Piper Sandler Cuts NBIS Target by 22% as Slide Deepens

Nebius Group has now lost 17% in a single week to close at $171.45, and the most pointed development is not the price action itself but the analyst move that landed this morning.

Piper Sandler's James Fish lowered his price target from $237 to $185 today, keeping a Neutral rating. That cut of 22% is the sharpest target reduction in the recent coverage wave and puts Fish's number just 8% above where the stock is trading. It is a notable contrast to the initiations that piled up through September and early October. Rosenblatt started at Buy with a $304 target on October 8. William Blair and Truist Securities launched at Outperform and Buy respectively. BNP Paribas upgraded to Outperform and raised its target to $399 on September 24. Against that backdrop, Fish's move today signals that some of the Street's early optimism is being recalibrated against a stock that has given back roughly 30% from its highs. The consensus remains Hold with no underperform ratings yet, and the spread between the most bullish target ($399) and the most bearish ($84, Rothschild) is wide enough to frame almost any outcome. The bear case is structural: free cash flow was negative $3.41 billion in Q2, net debt is essentially flat against cash at $8.55 billion of debt versus $8.04 billion of unrestricted cash, and capex of $5.66 billion in the quarter continues to outpace everything else. The bull case rests on a $40 billion-plus backlog, Microsoft and Meta as anchor customers, and revenue that grew 454% year over year to $582.3 million.

Borrow availability tightened sharply this week. Availability dropped to 41% by Tuesday, down from 49% on Monday and the tightest reading since late September. That means for roughly every two shares already on loan, only one remains available to borrow. The ORTEX short score has held in a narrow 68.0 to 68.7 band for the past two weeks, unchanged from the pattern noted in recent notes, consistent with an entrenched but not escalating short position. Short interest itself is 45.8 million shares, or 21.0% of free float. That number has barely moved since mid-September: it remains in the same 44.9 to 46.9 million range described in both prior notes. Cost to borrow nudged up to 0.69%, an 18% rise on the week, but remains low in absolute terms. The short position is large, orderly, and not pressing. Availability tightening while cost to borrow stays modest suggests the lending pool is drawing down passively as the stock falls, rather than new borrowers rushing in.

Options positioning matches the caution but does not amplify it. The put/call ratio eased marginally to 0.93 from 0.94 last week, still about 1.2 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.89. The direction of travel has been consistently more defensive since early October. The 52-week high on the PCR is 1.30, so current readings are elevated relative to recent norms but not at an extreme. With Q3 earnings scheduled for November 12, the options market is adding downside coverage without making an outright directional bet.

Peers are moving in the same direction but with varying severity. BTBT fell 26% on the week. KEEL dropped 18%. HUT shed 17%, almost exactly in line with Nebius. CORZ held up better at down 11%. The median decline across the closest correlated peers was around 14%, making NBIS's 17% drop slightly worse than the group but not an outlier. The selloff appears broad across compute-intensive and AI-adjacent infrastructure names rather than company-specific.

Institutional flow adds one notable data point. NVIDIA Corporation filed a Schedule 13G in July disclosing a 9.3% stake. Goldman Sachs filed a 13G/A in early October showing its position fell from 10.5% to 5.1% of shares, a significant trim. These are as-last-disclosed stakes; holders dropping below 5% are not required to file again, so the current Goldman position could be lower. On the insider side, Director Arne Grimme made small purchases of $25,000 each on October 16 and 19, both under a 10b5-1 plan. Director John Boynton sold roughly $494,000 of stock on October 15, also under a pre-arranged plan. Net insider activity over 90 days is a sale of $142 million in value, which includes heavier selling that predates the recent decline.

The November 12 earnings date is the next hard catalyst. The last Q2 print produced a 32% single-day move higher, and the Q1 result saw a 21% drop. The specific question at that print is whether revenue and ARR guidance holds given the pace of capex and the tightening availability of capital, and whether the Piper Sandler target revision marks the beginning of broader Street recalibration or a one-off reaction to the drawdown.