The Nasdaq-100 has always been a club for the biggest names in technology, and on Monday it admitted two companies that barely existed as public businesses three years ago. Nebius Group and CoreWeave joined the index before the open, part of a quarterly rebalance that also added Astera Labs, Rocket Lab and Teradyne while removing five longer-established members including Charter Communications and Cognizant. The additions, announced June 11, had already triggered a 34 percent rally in Nebius shares and a 24 percent gain in CoreWeave, as index-tracking funds positioned ahead of the change.
The two new members represent a category the index has not previously contained: companies whose entire business is renting out AI computing. CoreWeave, which went public in 2025, builds and operates data centers packed with Nvidia graphics processors and leases the capacity to AI developers on an hourly basis, a model it has scaled faster than almost any infrastructure company in history. Nebius, the Amsterdam-based company that emerged from the restructuring of Yandex’s international business, operates a similar AI cloud platform and has used its access to capital to fund one of the largest new data center pipelines in Europe.
The inclusion is a recognition that the AI infrastructure business has moved from the fringes of the market to its center. The Nasdaq-100’s membership has historically been defined by software, hardware and internet platforms, companies whose products are consumed indirectly. CoreWeave and Nebius sell raw compute, the commodity at the base of the AI stack, and their presence in the index signals that the market now treats compute capacity itself as a core technology asset class.
The two companies took different paths to the same destination. CoreWeave began as a cryptocurrency mining operation, pivoted to cloud computing after the 2018 crypto downturn, and rode the AI boom by signing huge, multi-year contracts with the labs and startups that needed GPU capacity faster than the big cloud providers could deliver. Nebius was born out of one of the most complex corporate restructurings in European tech history, when Yandex’s founders split the company’s Russian and international assets and rebuilt the international business around AI infrastructure. Both have been underwritten heavily by Nvidia, which has invested billions of dollars in the two companies as part of a strategy to finance the customers that buy its chips.
The financial stakes of index membership are significant. Passive funds benchmarked to the Nasdaq-100 must hold the stocks in proportion to their weighting, which creates a large, mechanical demand that persists as long as the companies remain members. For Nebius and CoreWeave, both of which have raised enormous amounts of capital and are spending faster than they earn, the index bid adds a stabilizing element to their shareholder bases. It also broadens the pool of institutional investors willing to hold the stocks, since many funds restrict themselves to index members.
The valuations attached to the newcomers are a subject of active debate. CoreWeave trades at roughly eight times trailing sales, and Nebius at a multiple far higher, reflecting expectations that revenue will grow for years as AI training and inference demand expands. Bulls argue that the companies’ contracted revenue — multi-year deals with customers like Anthropic and other AI developers — makes their growth visible in a way that the broader cloud market is not. Bears note that the same contracts create concentration risk and that the cost of building data centers is rising faster than the revenue the centers generate in their early years.
The inclusion also raises questions about the Nasdaq-100’s composition that the index’s managers will have to confront in future rebalances. Three of the five additions — CoreWeave, Nebius and Astera Labs — have received direct investment from Nvidia, and critics have noted that the index is increasingly a bet on the Nvidia ecosystem. The rebalance process itself changed this year, with a new methodology that allows more frequent additions, which is how companies as young as CoreWeave could enter the index so quickly after listing.
For the AI industry, the admission of the two companies closes a chapter. The infrastructure providers that grew up to serve the AI boom have been validated by the market’s most-watched benchmark, which means their quarterly results will now move index funds and set the tone for the broader technology complex. The companies’ earnings calls, previously followed mainly by specialist investors, will be scrutinized by the managers of trillions of dollars in passive assets.
The real test comes after the rebalance’s mechanical buying is done. Index membership guarantees demand at the moment of inclusion; it does nothing to guarantee that a company’s business justifies its valuation in the years that follow. CoreWeave and Nebius must keep signing contracts, building data centers on schedule and converting their enormous capital spending into profitable revenue, all while competing with the hyperscalers whose scale dwarfs their own. The Nasdaq-100 has welcomed them with open arms; whether they stay will be decided by the fundamentals of the AI computing market they helped create.
