The co-founder of Russian tech group Yandex, Arkady Volozh, is starting an AI Business in Europe, Financial Times reported.
Arkady Volozh will become the head of Nebius Group, an AI infrastructure company based in the Netherlands, which was previously Yandex’s parent company. Volozh is now leading 1,300 employees, primarily former Yandex staff, to build Nebius.
The company’s core business is developing a cloud computing platform designed to support the training and operation of large-scale AI models for startups.
‘We have engineers who have built big tech infrastructure [at Yandex] . . . we know how to do it very efficiently,’ Volozh said. “We know how to interconnect into supercomputers . . . and we know how to build really big clusters.’
He added that developers had to reinvent significant aspects of the projects on the fly, racing to keep up with rapid AI-driven technological advancements while also dealing with the separation from Yandex.
The rebranded Nebius holds $2.5 billion in cash following the sale of Yandex’s Russian business and has no debt. This strong financial position enables the company to invest in expanding its operations and return a substantial portion of the funds to its shareholders.
Nebius will continue to report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company also plans to launch a new board and hopes it can resume trading on the Nasdaq ‘in due course’ to attract additional funding.
‘We have an opportunity to build something bigger than there was,’ Volozh commented. ‘The scale of what we are building assumes there will be multibillion-dollar investments in the future through debt, through equity. What we have now . . . gives us a scale which I think doesn’t exist in Europe, outside of the big tech sector.’
According to Volozh, Nebius is already working with Europe’s best-known AI startups in France and Germany. Besides, the Nasdaq-listed company has a ‘strong and long-term relationship’ with the leading AI chipmaker Nvidia. Nebius has assembled clusters of tens of thousands of Nvidia chips in its existing data centre in Finland, and now it plans to triple them in size. This expansion aims to position Nebius as an independent alternative to major cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in the AI applications sector.