NEBIUS

Nebius did not start in a garage. It started as the surviving half of a breakup.

Yandex was Russia's dominant search and tech company, founded by Arkady Volozh in 2000. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, its stock was suspended and the company came under enormous pressure.

In 2024 Yandex sold its Russian operations for around $5.4 billion. The Amsterdam-based parent kept the international assets, a pile of cash, and thousands of engineers, then rebranded as Nebius Group.

Volozh, who had stepped back during the crisis, came back to run it. The new mission was simple.

Build AI infrastructure for the rest of the world.

Nebius rents out AI computing. It builds and runs data centers full of Nvidia GPUs and sells access to that power to companies training and running AI models.

Customers pay for compute by the hour or under long contracts. On top of the raw GPUs, Nebius offers the software tools that make the hardware easier to use.

It also owns a cluster of side businesses, including Avride in self-driving tech, Toloka in AI data, and the edtech company TripleTen. But the main story now is GPU cloud.

The flagship is Nebius AI Cloud, GPU computing rented to companies building AI. It comes with the software layer that makes training and deploying models easier.

Beyond the core cloud, Nebius owns Avride, which works on self-driving cars and delivery robots. It owns Toloka, a platform for the human-labeled data that AI models need to learn.

It also owns TripleTen, an online tech-education business. The group holds a stake in the database company ClickHouse as well.

Nebius had two things most AI startups would kill for. Cash from the Yandex sale and a deep bench of engineers who had already built cloud infrastructure at scale.

It used both to move fast, buying up Nvidia chips and building data centers in Europe and the US while demand was red hot. The turning point was landing anchor customers.

In 2025 it signed a multiyear deal reported at up to $19.4 billion to supply GPU capacity to Microsoft. That single contract turned Nebius from an interesting turnaround into a serious infrastructure player almost overnight.

Nebius is spending enormous sums to build data centers, and it is racing far bigger names to do it. CoreWeave, the cloud giants, and a wave of new GPU clouds are all chasing the same customers and the same scarce Nvidia chips.

That means huge upfront costs and thin room for error. There is also the shadow of its past.

The Yandex heritage means some customers and investors still ask questions about its Russian roots, even though the Russian business is gone. Volozh has to keep proving Nebius is a clean, Western, forward-looking company.

Nebius raised $700 million in a December 2024 private placement, and the headline name on that round was Nvidia. Having the world's most important chipmaker as a shareholder is a huge signal when your entire business depends on getting its GPUs.

Accel and Orbis also took part. Because Nebius trades publicly on Nasdaq, it has also tapped public markets directly, raising around $1 billion in convertible notes in 2025 to fund its data-center buildout.

On top of that, the Microsoft deal came with financing tied to the contract itself. This is a company with unusually deep access to capital for its age.