Nebius Gets $3.5B From Citi in a 364-Day Secured Facility

Nebius said on 22 October 2026 that it has entered into a $3.5 billion senior secured facility provided by Citi. The AI cloud company’s release says the facility “has a 364-day maturity and initially bears interest at Term SOFR plus 2.75% per annum, increasing up to a maximum of 3.50% per annum, and subject to other adjustments.”

Nebius says “The proceeds will be used for data center development and GPU procurement, as well as for general corporate purposes.” The deal lands a day after CNBC reported that the unsecured debt of CoreWeave, another neocloud, yields about 15%.

Business Pill · FINANCIAL CONDITIONS

A short Business Engineer explainer on financial conditions: how rates, spreads and stock prices together set what borrowing costs. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about Nebius or any company in this piece.

What Nebius Announced

A senior secured facility is a bank loan backed by the borrower’s assets, which ranks ahead of unsecured debt if things go wrong. Term SOFR is a benchmark US dollar interest rate, and the 2.75% is the margin Nebius pays on top of it.

The release says “Citi acted as mandated lead arranger, agent and security agent.” Nebius describes the loan as one piece of a wider plan: “It complements a funding base that includes customer prepayments and operating cash flows with other financing mechanisms.”

Ophir Nave, Nebius’s chief operating officer, said in the release: “Sequencing our financing is how we optimize our long-term cost of capital. This facility provides additional financing to support our near-term capacity build-out.”

Nave pointed to a larger pool behind it: “We still have a range of capital sources available to us to finance the next phase of growth, including asset-backed financing based on investment-grade customer commitments of more than $40 billion of long-term contracts.” By our arithmetic, that contract figure is more than 11 times the size of the Citi facility.

What Was Posted on X

Wall St Engine posted the headline at 11:07 UTC on 22 October, relaying Nebius’s announcement: a $3.5 billion senior secured facility from Citi with a 364-day maturity, interest starting at SOFR plus 2.75% and potentially rising to SOFR plus 3.50%. The terms in this piece are taken from Nebius’s own release.

Bloomberg’s post of 11:10 UTC the same day, linking its report that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he told Nscale to work around the clock to overcome challenges in bringing some of its data centers online. It is the source for the Nscale line in this piece; we have not read the full Bloomberg article.

Wall St Engine posted this at 09:08 UTC on 22 October, crediting Bloomberg Television’s Tom Mackenzie. Asked how far Nvidia would go to financially backstop or bail out a neocloud, Huang is quoted in the post separating Nvidia’s investments in neoclouds from backing them; the post also says he called them completely sold out and expects them to secure the working capital they need. Speaking to CNBC the same day at GTC Berlin, Huang said “there’s a scarcity of capital” for neoclouds and “That’s going to get solved.” Read alongside Nebius’s Citi facility, that points to lenders rather than Nvidia supplying the working capital; that is our reading.

Neocloud Financing This Month

Neoclouds are companies that rent out Nvidia graphics processors as a cloud service. Here is how the money behind three of them has been described in October, from each source.

Nscale was in the news again on 22 October. In a post on X, Bloomberg wrote that “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he told UK-based neocloud Nscale to “work around the clock” to overcome challenges in bringing some of its data centers online”.

As we read it, the rows are not a like-for-like price list. Nebius’s loan is a one-year bank facility backed by assets, while CoreWeave’s 15% is the market yield on traded unsecured debt, so the two numbers measure different kinds of money.

Connecting the Coverage

On 21 October we reported CNBC’s account that CoreWeave’s unsecured debt yields about 15%, with credit-desk sources telling CNBC that the high-yield market is effectively on hold until after the midterms. An update to that piece carried Huang’s Bloomberg TV remark that neoclouds are a “good investment”.

The same day we covered The Information’s tally, as summarised by SBS News, that Nvidia’s guarantees and commitments reach up to $164.5 billion. That summary said Nebius declined to participate in Nvidia’s guarantee program.

On 22 October our AI-fear dashboard tracked market moves that reporters tied to worries about the AI trade, from China’s CSI 300 to US Treasuries. Earlier we covered investor pushback on Nscale’s IPO valuation and The Information’s report that executives see only seven to 10 neoclouds surviving.

What’s new here: Nebius puts its own terms on the table, with a $3.5 billion secured loan from Citi, a 364-day maturity and a margin of 2.75% to 3.50% over Term SOFR, at a time when the sector’s debt prices are under scrutiny.

The Structural Read

As we read it, the release separates two kinds of money: a short secured bank loan now, and longer-term options that Nave says include asset-backed financing against more than $40 billion of long-term contracts.

As we read it, Nebius is choosing its own route: SBS’s summary of The Information said it declined to join Nvidia’s guarantee program, and this facility comes from a bank, with Citi as security agent.

As we read it, the terms arrive in a month when the sector’s debt is priced in public: CNBC put CoreWeave’s unsecured yield at about 15%, a different instrument from a secured, one-year loan.

Three Implications

FOR LENDERS The release says Citi “acted as mandated lead arranger, agent and security agent”, and the margin starts at 2.75% over Term SOFR, rising to a maximum of 3.50%.

FOR AI CLOUD CUSTOMERS Nave cites “investment-grade customer commitments of more than $40 billion of long-term contracts” as the base for possible asset-backed financing.

FOR OTHER NEOCLOUDS As we read it, Nebius’s release puts public terms on one neocloud’s secured borrowing, beside CNBC’s figures for CoreWeave and Bloomberg’s reports on Nscale’s IPO.

The Business Engineer Lens

This story maps onto the Business Engineer framework The AI Capex Map.

The framework argues that the capex race is no longer a corporate spending cycle: “It is a sovereign-scale financing problem dressed in tech-company clothing”. Its count of 2026 compute capex includes “$60B Neoclouds” within a total of about $1.04 trillion.

As we read it, Nebius’s release shows that financing problem at the level of one company: a one-year secured loan now, with asset-backed debt against contracts named as a later option. The framework was published in May 2026 and does not discuss Nebius’s facility.

What Is Not Established

The release gives the margin over Term SOFR but not an all-in interest rate, and it does not say what moves the margin from 2.75% towards 3.50%. It does not say how much of the facility has been drawn or which assets secure it. The $40 billion contract figure is the company’s own, and we have not seen the contracts.

The Bottom Line

Nebius has a $3.5 billion, 364-day secured facility from Citi at Term SOFR plus 2.75%, rising to at most 3.50%, to fund data centres and GPUs. Its chief operating officer says longer-term options include asset-backed financing on more than $40 billion of long-term contracts.