Nvidia leads $700M investment in ex-Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh’s Nebius Group to fuel AI infrastructure growth
Nvidia leads $700M investment in ex-Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh’s Nebius Group to fuel AI infrastructure growth
The funding will allow Nebius to scale GPU clusters and cloud platforms to meet AI demand.
AI infrastructure firm Nebius Group announced on Monday that it is raising $700 million in a private placement from investors including Nvidia, Accel, and some accounts managed by Orbis Investments.
Nebius emerged in July following a $5.4 billion deal to split the domestic and international assets of Russian internet giant Yandex. The company is joining the global effort to build the infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence.
Nebius was founded by Arkady Volozh, the former founder and CEO of Yandex. The company has a significant R&D center in Israel, and Volozh, who received Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return in 2017, has been living in Israel in recent years.
Trading in Nasdaq-listed Yandex was suspended soon after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Nebius later revived the listing as part of the asset split.
Volozh stated that the $700 million in financing would provide Nebius with the resources to build clusters of graphics processing units (GPUs), cloud platforms, and other tools for AI developers more quickly and at a larger scale.
Nebius has committed to investing $1 billion by mid-2025, though Volozh indicated that the company could invest more.
The company is currently leasing data center space in Kansas City, Missouri, and may expand further in the United States, where more than half of Nebius’s clients are based, Volozh said.
In a statement, Nebius announced it would issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at $21 per share in the private placement, representing approximately a 3% premium to the volume-weighted average price of those shares since Nasdaq trading resumed.
Nebius also stated that the financing round was oversubscribed, and the company has raised its annualized run-rate revenue forecast for year-end 2025 to between $750 million and $1 billion, up from a previous estimate of $500 million.
Additionally, Nebius announced that it would no longer pursue a share buyback, which had been approved as part of the Russia asset split deal, prior to the resumption of Nasdaq trading.
"Based on the strong level of investor engagement and the technical dynamics we’ve observed since the resumption of trading on Nasdaq, we believe that shareholders who may have wanted to exit have had an opportunity to do so at a price higher than the maximum repurchase price authorized by shareholders," said Nebius Board Chairman John Boynton.
