Arkady Volozh is the Founder and CEO of Nebius , one of the largest independent Al infrastructure providers. Nebius’ headquarters and main R&D presence is in Amsterdam, with additional R&D hubs across the Us, in Europe and Israel.
Before launching Nebius, Volozh co-founded Russia’s Yandex and ran it as the CEO for 25 years.Yandex, which was founded in 1997 – a year before Google -and counted U.S. Internet maven Esther Dyson as an early investor, was a rare Russian tech success story. It became known as “The Google of Russia,” given that it sold products broadly similar to its U.S. counterpart including search e-commerce, advertising, maps, transportation and more. While Yandex’s primary market was Russia, the company went public on the Nasdaq in 2011 via a holding company called Yandex N.V. registered in the Netherlands, followed by a secondary listing three years later on the Moscow Exchange.
Yandex hit a peak market cap of $31 billion on Nasdaq in November, 2021. However, in the months that followed, Yandex’s shares plunged as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, with the Nasdaq putting a temporary halt on trading Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Yandex N.V. divested its Russian assets – a process that took more than two years – and the company renamed as Nebius. Trading on Nasdaq restarted under a new ticker, NBIS, in Oct 2024. Following its listing, Nebius announced a private placement on Dec. 2, raising $700 million from the likes of Nvidia – a key long-time partner of the Nebius team – and venture capital firm Accel.
With more than $1 trillion projected to be spent on AI infrastructure in the near term and Nebius’ having been named as a launch partner for Nvidia’s next generational Blackwell platform, the Motley Fool said in a January blog posting that it believes the company is subtly positioned to “have a monster year.”
Volozh, who is scheduled to participate in a fireside chat with The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief on January 18 at the DLD conference in Munich, separately agreed to be interviewed for the publication on the same topics: the importance of alternative AI infrastructure and why 2025 could be the breakthrough year for autonomous vehicles.
Q: 2024 was quite a year for you. launched Nebius in July, built new data centers in November and relisted on NASDAQ and acquired new investors by December. How does it feel to start over?
AV: Nebius has rebuilt everything from scratch, but we are not starting from scratch. We are rising from the ashes with more than 850 hugely talented engineers across the group . The Nebius cloud business has team of more than 400 AI/ML and Cloud engineers with a track record of building Cloud services and infrastructure from scratch. We own every part of our tech stack, including building our own racks and our own stack of software on top of that and are benefiting from a long-standing collaboration with Nvidia across hardware and Cloud which gives us preferential access to the latest and most powerful GPUs. From the start we benefited from a highly energy-efficient data center in Finland that is home to one of the most powerful commercially available supercomputers in Europe. In addition to expanding the capacity of our Finnish data center, we are building greenfield data centers at new locations primarily in the U.S., as well as deploying additional GPU capacity through colocation data centers with modified architecture to reduce installation time.
We also have more than $2 billion in cash and no debt as well as the additional funding we raised in December. Being a public company will give us long-term access to capital on favorable terms as we seek to scale our existing businesses and create new ones.
Q: Tell us about the group’s initial businesses
Nebius is a “neocloud” built on deep expertise in hardware and software development. It builds large-scale GPU clusters and on top of that operates an AI-native cloud computing platform that gives AI innovators everything they need to build, train and run models and apps all in one place.
Nebius targets three groups of clients: AI native startups, venture-backed startups, corporate clients and Big Tech.
The group also includes Toloka (a data partner for GenAI), Avride (autonomous driving – develops robotaxis and delivery robots) and TripleTen (ed tech company, re-skilling people for careers in tech).
Nebius also owns a stake in ClickHouse, which we founded and which is the creator of a popular open-source column-oriented DBMS.
Q: Governments have begun to view AI compute infrastructures, including advanced AI chips, as a geostrategic resource.With good reason: in a recent podcast OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called compute “the currency of the future” and says he believes “it’ll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world.” Nebius is dealing in that currency, Please talk about the global AI race and Nebius’ role as an alternative global infrastructure provider.
AV: Today about half of AI chips are being used by the big model develops – OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Meta – for internal use, to build AI models and for inference -as they race to see who will be the first to get to Artificial General Intelligence.
Another 10% to 20% of compute goes to the public market through three or four hyperscalers such as Amazon and Oracle. The rest – 30% to 40% of compute – goes to a bunch of alternative players. There are dozens of them but only a few have the technology and the capital to build big infrastructure and sell tens of thousands of GPUs on the open market. This year will see the sale of hundreds of thousands of GPUs. In this category we are one of the largest providers of alternative AI infrastructure and one of the largest outside the U.S. Other players include CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, Together.ai and Deep Infra. Competition is always good. Nowadays nobody can build fast enough. The giants can barely serve their own needs.
We are one of the alternatives that can serve the basic needs of the big players; sell GPUs to startups and corporate clients who want to buy infrastructure and serve the needs of smaller clients who use models that are deployed by us. We are giving customers freedom of choice.
Q: Avride, another company in the Nebius Group, based out of Austin, Texas, targets autonomous vehicles. How do you see this market evolving?
AV: [Alphabet’s] Waymo’s success in San Francisco and Chinese autonomous car companies have proved that this technology is real. In 2025 driverless cars are going to become a business. This is a huge shift. Uber was a revolution. The next big revolution is driverless vehicles on public roads because the demand for taxis is bigger than what human drives can provide. GM has s left the autonomous car market and autonomous cars from China will be banned in the American market. It is not clear where that leaves Uber as it was partnering with GM’s Cruise, which announced in late 2024 it is leaving the market. For driverless taxis that leaves Waymo, Lyft and us.
Q: What are your predictions for 2025?
AV: Several big alternative AI infrastructure players will emerge as leaders in the market this year. We plan to be one of them. I also believe 2025 will prove to be the year of autonomous cars.
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