Retail lags on some AI names

Retail investors chasing artificial intelligence have piled into the obvious leaders, while lesser-known infrastructure names like Nebius and IREN have built large backlogs, contracts and capacity. (nebius.com) (iren.com) Nebius, which trades on Nasdaq under NBIS, said on February 12 that its annualized run-rate revenue reached $1.25 billion at the end of December 2025, above prior guidance of $900 million to $1.1 billion. The company told shareholders it expects year-end 2026 annualized run-rate revenue of $7 billion to $9 billion. (nebius.com) (assets.nebius.com) IREN, formerly Iris Energy, said on February 5 that it had secured $2.3 billion of contracted artificial intelligence revenue and was targeting 140,000 graphics processing units, or GPUs, to support $3.4 billion of annualized artificial intelligence cloud revenue by the end of calendar 2026. Its investor materials also said cash and cash equivalents stood at $2.8 billion as of January 31, 2026. (marketscreener.com) (markets.ft.com) The split inside the artificial intelligence trade is partly a business-model split. Nvidia sells the chips and systems that dominate training and inference, while Nebius and IREN are trying to rent out the computing power, data center space and cloud access built around those chips. (investor.nvidia.com) (nebius.com) (sec.gov) That helps explain why the biggest winner still sets the tone. Nvidia reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $215.9 billion on February 25, up 65% from a year earlier, including fourth-quarter data center revenue of $62.3 billion, up 75% year over year. (investor.nvidia.com) Nebius and IREN have both tried to narrow that credibility gap with large counterparties. Nvidia said on March 11 that Nebius plans to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of Nvidia systems by the end of 2030, while IREN said on November 3 that it signed a five-year Microsoft contract worth about $9.7 billion for NVIDIA GB300-based cloud services. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) (iren.com) The stocks have moved sharply anyway. Nebius closed at $144.97 on April 10, 2026, up 6.34% on the day, and IREN closed at $39.32, up 6.10%; Nvidia closed at $188.63, up 2.55%, while CoreWeave closed at $102.00, up 10.87%. (finance.yahoo.com 1) (finance.yahoo.com 2) (finance.yahoo.com 3) (finance.yahoo.com 4) Year to date, Yahoo Finance showed IREN up 4.10% as of April 10, while CoreWeave’s post-listing history showed the stock at $102.00 on April 10 versus $92.00 on March 28, 2025. Nebius’s quote page showed a $36.68 billion market capitalization and an estimated earnings date of April 29, 2026, giving investors another near-term test of whether backlog can convert into reported revenue. (finance.yahoo.com) (stockanalysis.com) (finance.yahoo.com) The next check on that retail-versus-professional divide will come from execution, not social posts. Nebius has guided to a much larger 2026 revenue run rate, and IREN has tied its case to contracted artificial intelligence revenue, financed GPUs and the Microsoft build-out already under way. (assets.nebius.com) (marketscreener.com)