Nebius vs Microsoft Azure
Nebius is a European alternative to Microsoft Azure: same cloud & hosting use case, headquartered in Netherlands and operating under GDPR by default, while Microsoft Azure (Microsoft) is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
Build, tune and run AI models on high-performance NVIDIA GPUs with flexible scaling, enterprise security, and competitive pricing starting at $2.00/hour.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- GDPR by default
- Yes
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- No
- Free tier
- No
Microsoft Azure by Microsoft.
- Jurisdiction
- US
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Nebius vs Microsoft Azure at a glance
| Nebius | Microsoft Azure | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Netherlands | US |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | US law applies |
| GDPR by default | Yes | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Open source | No | — |
| Free tier | No | — |
| Best for | Teams that need cloud & hosting with EU data residency | Teams already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem |
Choose Nebius if…
- You want your data to stay under EU law without extra legal paperwork
- GDPR compliance or public-sector requirements apply to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with Microsoft Azure if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the Microsoft ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Nebius
Nebius is a full-stack AI cloud delivering high-performance NVIDIA H100, H200 and GB200 GPU compute, managed Kubernetes and MLOps tooling for training, fine-tuning and serving large models. Listed on Nasdaq and headquartered in Amsterdam, it operates purpose-built AI data centres in Finland, France and Iceland.
The platform combines bare-metal and virtualised GPU instances with a vertically integrated stack: own-designed servers, in-house storage, high-bandwidth InfiniBand fabric and managed services for Slurm, Kubernetes, Soperator, MLflow and vector databases. An API-first control plane lets teams provision multi-thousand-GPU clusters in minutes.
Key benefits:
- NVIDIA H100, H200 and GB200 GPUs available from hourly to multi-year reservations
- InfiniBand-connected clusters scaling to thousands of GPUs for large-model training
- Managed Kubernetes and Slurm with Soperator for auto-scaling training workloads
- Object and file storage co-located with compute for bandwidth-intensive pipelines
- MLOps tooling including managed MLflow, Triton Inference Server and vector search
- Transparent per-second billing with reserved and spot pricing tiers
- SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and GDPR coverage across all regions
Nebius is headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, listed on Nasdaq (NBIS) and operates EU-located data centres in Mäntsälä (Finland), Paris (France) and Iceland, keeping customer workloads and training data under GDPR and EU jurisdiction.
Ideal for AI labs, foundation-model builders and enterprises who need thousands of GPUs on sovereign European infrastructure at competitive hourly economics.
Why choose Nebius over Microsoft Azure?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. Microsoft Azure is headquartered in US, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Nebius removes that overhead. As a Netherlands-based provider, it operates natively under GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single non-EU jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.