Shares in specialist AI cloud group Nebius rose 16 percent on Wednesday after Nvidia said it would invest $2 billion (£1.5bn) in the firm, one of its major customers.

The investment is Nvidia’s latest in its partners and large customers of its AI accelerator GPUs, deals that have often proven popular with investors seeking exposure to the worldwide AI craze.

On Tuesday Nvidia said it made a “significant” investment in Thinking Machines, founded by former OpenAI scientist Mira Murati, which also agreed to buy billions of dollars worth of AI chips.

Nvidia took part in a $2bn in a funding round for UK cloud start-up Nscale that closed on Monday.

Nscale, like Nebius, is a specialist cloud operator that relies heavily on Nvidia chips.

Such deals have drawn concern, as a major AI company funding its customers recalls practices of the late-1990s tech boom that led to a market crash.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Amsterdam-based Nebius, formed from Yandex’s assets outside of Russia, was building infrastructure especially for AI’s next generation of semi-autonomous agents.

Nebius said it would probably need tens of billions of dollars to fuel infrastructure plans to meet “overwhelming” demand.

The company plans to build up to 5 GW of Nvidia-based computing infrastructure by 2030.