Behind the Headlines
On August 6, Nebius ($NBIS) took a -13.29% dive.
Do you have any idea why?
Many traders will tell you it was a guy named Michael Burry, after he disclosed a short position against Nebius at $211.77.
It made a wonderful headline.
But I’m here to tell you that is wrong.
Burry’s disclosure may have triggered some algorithms to sell, and it may have nudged retail traders into locking in profits or even climbing aboard the short beside him.
But I’m telling you he was not the catalyst.
The real event didn’t even happen on August 6.
It happened the evening before, after the closing bell on Wednesday, August 5.
And it wasn’t anywhere near Wall Street.
It happened inside a 750-seat theater in Vineland, New Jersey.
Well, dear reader, that catalyst is happening again tonight:
⏰ Monday, August 17, at 18:00 ET.
This post is meant to get you ready for it, because NBIS might move wildly again.
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The 300-Megawatt Monster
To help you understand what happened inside the Landis Theatre on the evening of August 5—and what will happen there again tonight—we first have to look at what is being built in Vineland, New Jersey.
Vineland is a farming community in Cumberland County, in the southern part of the state, with a population of 63,126.
It has fields, and it is quiet.
It used to host the Palace of Depression, a house made of junk, built by an eccentric Alaska gold miner who lost his fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929 (that could be you one day!)
But what we really care about is the site of a former golf course, on which the neocloud provider Nebius is setting up its first major U.S. data center.
The facility is planned as a 300-megawatt monster.
To put that in perspective, we’re talking enough power for roughly 250,000 homes.
On August 5, there was a public hearing about it. But it wasn’t your standard, sleepy municipal assembly where four people show up and three of them are on the board.
It was a fight.
So many residents turned up to debate over Nebius’s gigantic data center and its proposed expansion that city officials had to move the entire hearing to the historic Landis Theatre. It was the largest venue in town that could hold the crowd.
Seven hundred and fifty seats and nearly every one of them was filled.
This is a Fox 29 Philadelphia report on that public hearing.
It’s unlikely, but in case she uploads something for tonight, I’ll keep an eye on the local reporter’s Instagram account, too.
What is at Stake
Local residents are pushing back hard against the development.
And Wall Street reacted so violently because of what Nebius has at stake on that former golf course:
- Client: Microsoft ($MSFT) has already contracted dedicated GPU compute capacity at the Nebius Vineland facility over a five-year term.
- Deal size: The MSFT contract is valued at $17.4 billion through 2031, with options that would carry it to $19.4 billion should Microsoft take additional capacity.
- Fine print: If Nebius misses its agreed delivery dates, exhausts the standard grace period, and is unable to provide alternative capacity, Microsoft retains the right to terminate the contract.
The Bloom Energy Play
Normally, connecting a 300 MW facility to the regional utility grid means waiting years in regulatory interconnection queues.
That’s why Nebius decided to bypass that bottleneck entirely by relying on off-grid, solid oxide fuel cells powered by on-site liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Bloom Energy ($BE) is the supplier.
That is another crucial AI-related ticker, and one I have been trading since late 2024.
On paper, the strategy was brilliant. Bypass the grid deadlock, deploy the power, and