Nebius, formerly Yandex, recently managed to raise $700 million in an investment round. The European AI infrastructure specialist aims to significantly expand its AI data center capacity. Nvidia is one of the investors.
Nebius plans to use the new investments to build its own AI infrastructure through investments in dedicated AI data centers in greenfield locations. Further expansion will be done through the establishment of colocations and further expansion of its own data centers.
The obtained $700 million will be used primarily to expand operations in the United States. In the US, Nebius recently installed its first Nvidia GPU cluster in Kansas City. It also already has sites in San Francisco, Dallas and soon, New York City.
Specifically, through its AI-native Nebius GPU cloud, the AI infrastructure specialist provides the environments for managing the full machine learning lifecycle in one location, from data processing and training of ML models to fine-tuning and inference. The Nebius AI Studio inference service also provides developers access to a range of top-notch open-source models.
Seat in Board
Participants in the new investment round included Nvidia, as well as well-known venture capital investors such as Accel and asset manager Orbis. In return for their money, the investors will receive a total of 33.3 million Class A shares at a price of $21 per share. This is three percent higher than the current Nasdaq share price. In addition, they will receive a seat on the Board of Directors.
The investments will soon give the European AI infrastructure specialist a growth budget of about $3 billion in cash. The company expects to make revenues of between $750 million and $1 billion by 2025.
Nebius is the former Yandex
The new round of investment comes at a precarious time for Nebius. The company, which emerges from the former Russian and Netherlands-based Yandex group, suspended its Nasdaq listing three years ago because of sanctions policies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was not until October this year that it activated its listing again.
In recent years, the Yandex group has divested itself of its Russian roots and continues its Dutch operations under the new name: Nebius Group. The company is again headed by Yandex founder Arkady Volozh, who has managed to remove himself from the international sanctions list. Nebius is headquartered at Schiphol-Rijk.
Read more: Yandex ends operations in Russia