Amsterdam-based Nebius, which builds comprehensive AI infrastructure for technology companies, has secured $700 million in a private equity deal led by Nvidia, Accel and asset manager Orbis.
The financing takes place in the form of a private placement – when a company sells shares directly to a private investor rather than on the public market. The deal calls for Nebius to issue 33.3 million Class A shares at $21 apiece.
Nebius, the rebranded European arm of “Russia’s Google” Yandex, is investing more than $1 billion across Europe by mid-2025 to capitalize on booming demand for AI computing power. The company also recently announced plans to build its first GPU cluster in the US.
“We have demonstrated the scale of our ambition and initiated the expansion of AI infrastructure on two continents,” said Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius. “This strategic funding gives us additional firepower to do this faster and at scale.”
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Nebius' expansion strategy includes building new custom data centers and expanding existing facilities like his Data center in Finland, which we visited in October. In addition, additional capacity is provided through colocation.
Volozh wants Nebius to become a phoenix, rising from the ashes of what was left of Yandex after the company's founding Disinvestment from Russia at the beginning of the year. The $5.4 billion deal represented the largest corporate withdrawal from the country since Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine began more than two years ago.
Nebius' core product is an AI-centric cloud platform for intensive AI workloads. The company is also one of However, the launch partners for Nvidia's legendary Blackwell GPUs are no guarantee.
“The deal is not about the GPUs” Volozh told Bloomberg. “But of course it shows our close relationship, which we hope will influence our pipeline.”
Investors are investing huge sums in AI computing. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global AI infrastructure market size is expected to grow from $46.15 billion in 2024 to $356.14 billion in 2032. A competitor to Nebius, US company CoreWeave, is preparing for an initial public offering that could value the company, founded in 2017, at $35 billion.
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