Feb 12 (Reuters) - Nebius Group reported a sharp rise in quarterly capital spending on Thursday, driven by purchases of artificial intelligence processors and growing data center investments, as the AI cloud firm rushes to secure capacity to meet soaring demand.

The Amsterdam-based company NBIS.O said capital expenditures ballooned to about $2.1 billion in the December quarter, compared with just $416 million in the prior year period, sending its shares down 3% in premarket trading.

Nebius is one of the major so-called neocloud companies that offer hardware and cloud capacity as services to other tech firms. Its core business involves providing Nvidia NVDA.O graphics processing units and AI cloud infrastructure.

Along with its larger rival CoreWeave CRWV.O, Nebius has benefited from strong demand this year. The company has struck multi-billion-dollar cloud deals with Big Tech firms including Meta META.O and Microsoft MSFT.O.

Nebius reported a more than six-fold surge in revenue to $227.7 million for the fourth quarter, but it still missed estimates of $246.1 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Its net loss from continuing operations widened to $249.6 million in the quarter from $122.9 million a year earlier.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)

((DeborahMary.Sophia@thomsonreuters.com;))