A Once-in-a-Decade Investment Opportunity: The Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Buy in March 2026

Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) could be the best artificial intelligence (AI) stock to buy right now.

Valued at a market cap of US$28.5 billion, Nebius is growing at a pace that rivals early-stage hyperscalers. It already has Microsoft and Meta as customers, and is targeting US$7 billion to US$9 billion in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2026. The opportunity is large, the team has done this before, and the market hasn’t fully caught on yet.

Here’s why we think the AI stock is a rare buy.

Nebius is building the AI cloud

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud dominate the cloud market. But AI start-ups, enterprise companies building AI tools, and the thousands of developers racing to deploy models don’t always want to go through the big three. They want flexibility, speed, and infrastructure built specifically for AI workloads.

That’s what Nebius is building.

It offers a full-stack AI cloud, from the physical data centers and custom GPU racks it designs itself to managed cloud services, an inferencing platform called Token Factory, agentic search capabilities, and developer tools.

Think of it as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company built from scratch with no legacy baggage.

CEO Arkady Volozh described the vision at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in March 2026: “We are building a real platform for AI developers, a real cloud, full-stack cloud.”

Before starting Nebius, Volozh and his engineers spent 25 years running one of the largest technology companies in Europe, operating 200 megawatts of data centre infrastructure and serving as NVIDIA’s largest partner outside of the United States and China. They know how to build at scale.

The numbers behind Nebius’s explosive growth

Eighteen months ago, Nebius had a single data centre with 25 megawatts of capacity. Today, it operates nearly 10 times that. By the end of 2026, the company expects to reach 800 megawatts to one gigawatt of active power, with a pipeline of sites approaching three gigawatts.

• On the revenue side, Nebius is targeting $7 billion to $9 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.
• About half of that is already supported by existing contracts, including landmark deals with Microsoft and Meta.
• The other half is being pursued through an expanding go-to-market push across AI start-ups, software vendors, and enterprise customers.

To fund the US$16 billion to US$20 billion in capital expenditures (CapEx) required this year, roughly 60% is already covered. The rest will come from revenue generation, asset-backed financing, and, notably, customers paying upfront, sometimes 100% in advance.

When customers are willing to prepay in full for future compute capacity, it says something about how scarce and in-demand the supply really is.

Why Nebius stands out from the AI crowd

Most AI infrastructure companies are either pure hardware plays or pure software plays. Nebius is both.

By building its own racks, data centres, and software stack, the company captures margin at every layer. Boroditsky noted at the conference that about 80% of CapEx goes toward filling facilities with graphic processing units, and 20% toward building the facilities themselves, a capital-efficient model designed to scale.

The company is also seeing inferencing grow faster than training on its platform. Inferencing is where AI models get deployed commercially and is the revenue engine of the AI economy. Customers moving from training to inferencing means they’re moving from experimentation to real business use.

Nebius recently acquired Tavily, a specialist in agentic search, to further strengthen its platform for AI developers building autonomous agents.

For Canadian investors looking for exposure to the AI infrastructure buildout, Nebius offers something rare: a founder-led company with a proven team, a differentiated product, massive tailwinds, and a valuation that hasn’t yet caught up to the opportunity.

What is the Nebius stock price target?

Analysts tracking NBIS stock forecast revenue to increase from US$529.8 million in 2025 to US$32.6 billion in 2030. The AI stock is forecast to end 2030 with a free cash flow of US$4.78 billion, compared to an outflow of US$15.82 billion this year.

If Nebius stock is priced at 20 times forward free cash flow (which is reasonable), it could surge 235% within the next four years.

The post A Once-in-a-Decade Investment Opportunity: The Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Buy in March 2026 appeared first on The Motley Fool Canada.

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Fool contributor Aditya Raghunath has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.