(Reuters) -Nebius Group’s shares soared nearly 50% to $95.7 on Tuesday as investors cheered its $17.4-billion deal supplying AI infrastructure to Microsoft over a five-year period.

The partnership comes amid an unprecedented surge in demand for artificial-intelligence data centers, as businesses accelerate the race to build more advanced generative AI technologies.

The stock, which has more than doubled this year, rose 49.5% in premarket trading, while shares of rival CoreWeave were up 6.3%.

Nebius is set to add around $7.7 billion to its $15.3-billion market capitalization, if gains hold.

“We continue to believe that Nebius is well set up to bring on other high-profile customers, including other hyperscalers or frontier AI labs, as the company continues to build out their data center

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