The AI infrastructure race is ON. CapEx spend has never been greater.

At the centre of it: Nebius.

$66BN market cap. Going head-to-head with the largest hyperscalers on the planet.

Leopold Aschenbrenner just made them one of his largest positions.

I sat down with @nebiusai Co-Founder, @romanchernin and I’ve condensed my notes below:

1. How Reducing the Cost of Intelligence Increases Consumption

Reducing the unit cost of intelligence triggers Jevons Paradox: total compute consumption rises as previously uneconomic tasks become viable. At scale, builders move toward tunable open-source architectures and specialized post-training, while frontier labs expand into larger, harder reasoning markets.

2. If Nebius Doubled Pricing, How Would That Impact Demand?

Nebius’s pricing power is capped by customer economics. If inference costs rise too high, customer margins break and demand stalls. The real edge is not nominal GPU pricing, but Total Cost of Ownership: caching, runtime optimization, and distillation can shift token economics by an order of magnitude.

3. If Nebius Had 10x the Capacity, Could They Sell It?

The real question is not whether raw demand exists, but whether Nebius can diversify it. Bare metal concentrates revenue around a few global giants. Moving up the stack into managed infrastructure and specialized inference expands the market to thousands of application developers.

4. What Is the Single Biggest Threat to Nebius?

The biggest threat is extreme consolidation into three to five closed tech empires. If a few conglomerates control the frontier model landscape, independent clouds risk becoming low-margin physical-layer vendors. Survival depends on a broad, democratized ecosystem of independent builders.

5. Who Actually Holds Power Against Nvidia?

Power against Nvidia comes from engineering credibility, not political posturing. Nvidia is deeply engineering-driven, so influence comes from proving technical capability across the stack. Differentiation requires a world-class team that reliably executes and earns operational respect.

6. Surviving the Hyper-CapEx War

Competing with hyperscaler CapEx requires respecting operational timelines. Capital cannot compress a six-month infrastructure bottleneck, but over 18 to 24 months it matters. It lets providers parallelize execution, secure power, lock data centers, and prepare capacity ahead of GPU deployment.

7. The Shark Rule: Move or Die

Cloud infrastructure is a post-sales business: every funding round or contract is only a credit and an opportunity to deliver. Survival requires relentless forward motion, disciplined execution, and focus on daily operations rather than emotional market spikes or consolidation noise.

(links below)