Layer 2.5 · head to head
Nebius vs Nscale
Two European builds, one public and one private, both selling sovereignty.
| Nebius | Nscale | |
|---|---|---|
| Can you leave | Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking. | Portable. The workload is standard enough to move to another vendor without a rewrite. |
| Counterparty | One of the few at this layer you can actually diligence — quarterly results are public. Revenue grew roughly 4.5x year-over-year in Q2 2026 off a small base. Same 2026-2028 GPU-debt maturity picture as its peers. | Private and young. Diligence accordingly. |
| What it is | Purpose-built GPU cloud. Owns or leases its own datacentre capacity and sells it directly. | Purpose-built GPU cloud. Owns or leases its own datacentre capacity and sells it directly. |
| How you reach it | You get virtual machines. The familiar cloud model. | You get a cluster. Assumes you already run Kubernetes at scale. |
| Accelerators | H100, H200, B200, L40S | H100, H200, B200, MI300X |
| Regions | EU (Finland), US | Norway, UK, EU |
| Pricing model | On-demand and reserved, published openly. | On-demand and reserved. |
| Getting started | Self-serve on-demand. | Sales-led with self-serve options. |
| Capacity | Expanding hard; Finland datacentre is the anchor. | Nordic hydro-powered sites are the anchor. |
| Ownership | Public, files with the SEC as a foreign private issuer. | Private. |
Nebius
For: European workloads where data residency matters, and anyone who wants a supplier whose numbers they can read before signing.
The catch: Smaller footprint than CoreWeave, and the European centre of gravity is a feature or a latency problem depending entirely on where your users are.
Economics: Published pricing sits below CoreWeave's list on comparable parts. Publishing at all is a differentiator at this layer.
Nscale
For: European AI workloads with a sustainability requirement written into procurement.
The catch: Nordic siting means excellent power economics and real latency to anywhere that is not Northern Europe.
Economics: Hydro power and free cooling are a structural cost advantage, not a marketing line. It shows up in reserved pricing.
Neither table row is a price
Deliberately. Published on-demand rates at this layer move weekly, and essentially nobody signing a real contract pays them — every serious buyer pays less than every list figure either of these companies publishes. Quoting one here would date this page within a month.
The GPU rental price index carries dated, sourced figures instead, and the durable finding there is the spread: the identical H100 rents from roughly $1.38 to $12.29 an hour depending only on who you rent it from.
The layers underneath both
Whichever you pick is renting you chips in a building that needs power. In 2026 that is the constraint that binds: Microsoft has disclosed an Azure backlog it cannot fill for want of megawatts rather than accelerators, and the US interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with roughly 80% of projects withdrawing before they energise.
Layer 2 — Silicon · Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue