Billionaire Arkady Volozh, known as the architect of the “Russian Google,” valued at $30 billion at its peak, has long had an apolitical public persona. “I have no friction with the state,” Volozh told WIRED in 2017. “Just like I have no friction with the weather. What if it rains? I need to build a service to keep the rain out.”
Volozh couldn’t avoid the rain, though. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he was hit with EU sanctions and forced to leave Yandex, the internet giant he created with the late Ilya Segalovich. Today, the tech billionaire is announcing his return as CEO of a new European artificial intelligence company. Nebius Group is technically a reinvention of the Russian internet giant Yandex. Volozh and his team have spent the past two years in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, selling off parts of the business that were still based in Russia, including the search engine.
Yandex’s Dutch parent company (Yandex NV) was forced to accept a reduced price of just $5 billion for the storied Russian internet giant, in line with Russian rules for Western companies seeking to leave the country. However, thanks to that deal, Volozh’s team was able to rescue parts of Yandex that were already based abroad, including four business units focused on artificial intelligence. These are the assets that will be rebranded and turned into what Volozh hopes will become one of the world’s leading AI infrastructure companies.
“This life is different,” Volozh says of his new role as CEO of Nebius. “It feels great to be free and start something new.”
On Monday, sitting in an office in Amsterdam, Volozh doesn’t want to talk politics. He wants to focus on his new project. The main part of Nebius’ business will be its cloud division and Volozh wants to offer AI developers access to big tech-style infrastructure without the conflicting interest of American giants who are building their own models on the side. “We’re building infrastructure for the people who build the models to build AI,” Volozh says, explaining the plan behind Nebius.
Nebius has one data center in Finland (where it plans to triple its capacity this year) and is building several more from scratch with “hundreds of megawatts of capacity each,” Volozh says, emphasizing that the company already has billions in capital and plans to raise more.
Until Nebius’ new data centers are built, mostly in Europe, the company is renting space in dozens of existing data centers. “With rented capacity, we will exceed 100 megawatts,” he says. “People are increasingly realizing that the next big bottleneck is the infrastructure itself: the data centers, the energy – this is one of the key points for this industry.”
Volozh, as CEO, is not the only similarity between Yandex and Nebius. Of the 1,300 people working for the startup now in Europe, “many of them” used to work at Yandex in Russia, Volozh says. He also plans to replicate the same formula that made Yandex a success: Nebius has units dedicated to autonomous driving, data labeling and education technology. “We hope that this AI cloud[business]will be our main source of revenue for the start and give us the opportunity to grow other things,” Volozh explains.