🚀 Nebius: How the Former Yandex N.V. Became an AI Industry Giant
In just 18 months following the split of Yandex, Arkady Volozh's international group has transformed from a fragment of Russia's largest technology corporation into a leading infrastructure player in the global AI market.
As of March 2026, Nebius's valuation has surpassed $30 billion—roughly a third more than the valuation of Yandex's entire Russian business.
🌐 What Does Nebius Sell?
While Yandex focused on building an ecosystem for millions of consumers, Nebius is betting entirely on the B2B segment. Unlike general-purpose clouds like Amazon or Google, Nebius occupies a specialized niche of "AI factories."
The company inherited the ultra-efficient 25 MW Mäntsälä data center in Finland, which has already tripled in capacity. Between 2024 and 2025, the group launched new clusters in the U.S., France, Iceland, the UK, and Israel.
By the end of 2030, Nebius plans to scale its capacity from 170 MW to 5 GW—a figure projected to be double the combined capacity of all AI centers in Russia.
💻 Why Did Nebius Succeed?
The backbone of Nebius is the core Yandex team that spent decades building hyper-complex distributed systems. This unique engineering talent became the company's primary asset.
"When [ChatGPT happened,] we realized that the assets we have, the people, the talent is very much very well fit to this new era," Volozh says.
The alliance with Nvidia was the ultimate catalyst for global trust. In late 2024, the company invested $700 million in Volozh's business, signaling to the market that Nebius was a company worth trusting.
In September 2025, Microsoft signed a $19.4 billion deal with Nebius to deploy capacity in the U.S. for Azure AI. Then, in early March, Zuckerberg's company signed a $27 billion contract with Nebius.
Earlier this month, Nvidia directly invested another $2 billion in Nebius, granting early access to its latest Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips and placing the company at the forefront of the AI race.
💡 What's Next?
In February 2026, the company agreed to acquire startup Tavily in order to bring real-time search and fact verification by AI models into its cloud platform.
Through its subsidiary Avride, Nebius is also developing a platform for training robots. The project has already moved into commercial use: delivery rovers are operating in partnership with Uber in the U.S. and Rakuten in Japan.
This is how Nebius is trying to move beyond pure infrastructure. The company now looks increasingly capable of growing from a successful startup into a major global tech business.
@hiaimediaen
