Billionaire Arkady Volozh, known as the architect of “Russia’s Google,” which was valued at $30 billion at its peak, has long maintained 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 happens if it rains? I have to build a service to avoid the rain.”
Yet Volozh couldn’t escape the rain. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he was personally targeted by EU sanctions and forced to resign from Yandex, the internet giant he built with the late Ilya Segalovich. Today, the tech billionaire is announcing his comeback as CEO of a new European AI company. Nebius Group is technically a reinvention of Russian internet giant Yandex. Volozh and his team have spent the past two years in complicated negotiations with the Kremlin, selling off parts of the still-Russian-based company, including its search engine.
For the famed Russian internet giant, Yandex’s Dutch parent company (Yandex NV) was forced to accept a cut-price deal of just $5 billion, under Russian rules for Western companies trying to leave the country. However, from that deal, Volozh’s team was able to salvage parts of Yandex that were already based abroad, including four business units focused on AI. Those are the assets that are being rebranded and transformed 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 really good to be free and start something new.”
Sitting in an office in Amsterdam on Monday, Volozh doesn’t want to talk politics. He wants to focus on his brand-new project. The centerpiece of Nebius’ business will be its cloud division, and Volozh wants to give AI developers access to big tech-like infrastructure without the conflicting interests of the American giants building their own models on the side. “We’re building infrastructure for the people who are building the models to build AI,” Volozh says, explaining the plan behind Nebius.
Nebius owns one data center in Finland, where it plans to triple capacity this year, and is building several more with hundreds of megawatts of capacity each, Volozh said, stressing that the company already has billions in capital and plans to raise more.
Until Nebius' new data centers are built, mainly 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 understanding that the next big bottleneck is the infrastructure itself — it’s the data centers, the energy — this is one of the major bottlenecks for this industry.”
Volozh as CEO isn’t the only similarity between Yandex and Nebius. Of the 1,300 people now working for the new company in Europe, “many” used to work for Yandex in Russia, Volozh says. He also plans to replicate the same formula that made Yandex so successful: Nebius has units focused on self-driving cars, data tagging and educational technology. “We hope that this AI cloud [business] “It will be our main source of income in the beginning and it gives us the opportunity to grow other things,” Volozh explains.
