LONDON, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Nebius Group ( NBIS ) said

on Wednesday it would raise $3 billion to fuel growth in its

core artificial intelligence cloud business, on the heels of its

$17.4-billion deal with Microsoft ( MSFT ).

The financing includes a $2 billion private offering of

convertible senior notes and a $1 billion underwritten public

offering of the company's class A shares.

Goldman Sachs is lead book-running manager on the public

offering alongside Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities and Citigroup

as additional book-running managers.

Nebius ( NBIS ) said it will use the cash to finance continuing

growth, including the acquisition of additional compute power

and hardware, securing land plots with reliable providers and

expanding its data center footprint.

On Monday, Amsterdam-based Nebius ( NBIS ) announced it would provide

Microsoft ( MSFT ) with GPU infrastructure capacity over a five-year

term. Microsoft ( MSFT ) may also acquire additional services capacity

under the deal, bringing the total contract value to about $19.4

billion.

On Tuesday, its Nasdaq-listed shares soared over 49% to a

record high, driven by the Microsoft ( MSFT ) deal. They are up 245% so

far this year. Shares were down 5.6% in pre-market trading on

Wednesday.

Nebius ( NBIS ) emerged from a deal to split the assets of Russian

tech company Yandex.

Global demand for data center capacity has risen sharply in

recent years as companies tap into new technologies to run their

businesses, especially after the emergence of generative

artificial intelligence.