Nebius Group shares fell 10.1% by 2:32 p.m. ET Thursday after a contentious public hearing Wednesday evening over the proposed expansion of its 300-megawatt data center in Vineland, New Jersey. The stock had been down as much as 10.5% intraday, erasing a chunk of the momentum that followed Nvidia's disclosure last month of a nearly 10% stake in the neocloud operator.
The facility and the flashpoint
The Vineland site, built in partnership with DataOne, is Nebius' first major U.S. data center. At 45 football fields in size, the first phase is nearing completion, and the company has applied to increase the footprint several-fold. Wednesday's planning board hearing was moved from City Hall to a local theater to accommodate the crowd. Residents raised concerns about transparency, water consumption, noise, and air quality, the same friction points appearing in data center disputes across the country.
The Nvidia backdrop
Nvidia's stake announcement last month gave Nebius a seal of credibility in the GPU-as-a-service race. The neocloud model, building data centers and renting out Nvidia GPU capacity for AI workloads, has attracted a rush of capital and a corresponding rush of local opposition. Electricity and water demands are the usual flashpoints, and Vineland is no exception.
No decision yet
The planning board has not ruled on the expansion. That makes the sell-off a reaction to political risk rather than a material change in operations. The first phase proceeds regardless; only the scale-up is in question. Investors are pricing in the possibility that community pushback delays or shrinks the next phase, which would cap U.S. capacity growth for a company still building its American footprint.
What to watch
The board's decision, whenever it comes, will set the tone for Nebius' U.S. rollout. A rejection or heavy conditions would force a rethink of the expansion pipeline. Approval with standard mitigations would let the story revert to GPU utilization and revenue per megawatt. Until then, the stock trades on a zoning hearing.