NBIS Grinds Toward $300 as Record Shorts Meet Nasdaq-100 Buying

The Engine: A Record Short Base Meets Forced Buying

The continuation has a mechanical driver behind it. Short interest in Nebius recently sat near a record 17.6% of shares outstanding, one of the heaviest short positions in large-cap AI, and every leg higher pressures some of that book to cover into a thinning offer. Layer on Nasdaq-100 inclusion on June 22, which obligates the funds and ETFs tracking the benchmark to buy the shares regardless of valuation, and you get forced demand stacking on top of forced covering. That is the textbook recipe for a squeeze, and the tape knows it — retail traders have been openly posting about shorts "drowning in losses". The 7.25% move in the HIP-3 perp to $278.70 over six hours mirrors the underlying's roughly 7% push to $279.49, so this is not a perp-only dislocation; the cash market is carrying it.

The Fundamentals Backstopping the Bid

A squeeze runs further when shorts can't lean on a cheap fundamental story to fade it, and Nebius doesn't give them one. Q1 revenue hit $399 million, up 684% year over year, with core AI-cloud revenue compounding even faster on an annualized run rate near $1.9 billion. Management has guided 2026 capex into the $20–25 billion range to keep building out GPU clusters and data centers, underwritten by Nvidia's $2 billion equity investment, a multiyear Meta capacity agreement reported around $27 billion, and additional Microsoft compute deals. The sell side has chased it: Bank of America's Tal Liani raised his target to $280 from $240, citing strengthening compute demand and a more strategic software stack. With a contracted backlog measured in the tens of billions, the bears are shorting a name whose forward bookings keep validating the capex.

What's Overhead, and What Cuts Both Ways

The level that matters now is the 52-week high of $299.86. NBIS has tagged BofA's $280 target and is grinding into record territory, which means the round $300 handle is the next obvious magnet for trend-followers and the next pain threshold for anyone still short. The honest caveat is that price already trades far above the Street's average target near $200 — from here the move is momentum and positioning, not a re-rate off a discounted valuation. And the same dynamic that fuels the upside reverses violently: a 17.6% short base that's been squeezed for days is also dry powder for a snap lower the moment longs take profits or the passive bid is fully absorbed. As the highest-beta neocloud, Nebius runs hardest in both directions, and at all-time highs with a stretched valuation, the second derivative is what to respect.