Billionaire Arkady Volozh, known as the architect of the “Russian Google” that was worth $30 billion at its peak, has long maintained an apolitical public persona. “I have no friction with the state,” Volozh told WIRED in 2017. “Just as I have no friction with the weather. What happens if it starts raining? I have to create a service that avoids the rain.”
Still, Volozh couldn’t avoid the rain. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he was personally hit with EU sanctions and forced to leave Yandex, the internet giant he built with the tardy Ilya Segalovich. Today, the tech billionaire is announcing his return as CEO of a recent European AI company. Nebius Group is technically a reinvention of Russian internet giant Yandex. Volozh and his team have spent the past two years in complicated negotiations with the Kremlin, selling off parts of the company that are still based in Russia, including its search engine.
For the celebrated Russian internet giant, Yandex’s Dutch parent company (Yandex NV) was forced to accept a cut-price deal of just $5 billion, in line with Russian regulations for Western companies trying to leave the country. However, from that deal, Volozh’s team was able to salvage parts of Yandex that were already overseas, including four AI-focused business units. These are assets that will be rebranded and transformed into what Volozh hopes will become one of the world’s leading AI infrastructure companies.
“This life is different,” Volozh says of his recent role as Nebius CEO. “It’s very good to be free and start something new.”
Sitting in his Amsterdam office on Monday, Volozh doesn’t want to talk politics. He wants to focus on his recent project. The core of Nebius’ business will be its cloud division, and Volozh wants to offer AI developers access to big-tech-style infrastructure without the conflicting interests of American giants who build their own models on the side. “We’re building infrastructure for people who build models to build AI,” Volozh says, explaining the plan behind Nebius.
Nebius owns one data center in Finland, where it plans to triple its capacity this year, and is building several others from scratch, with “hundreds of megawatts of capacity each,” Volozh says, noting that the company already has billions in capital and plans to raise more.
Until Nebius’ recent data centers are built — mostly in Europe — the company is renting space in dozens of existing data centers. “With the rented capacity, [we] will exceed 100 megawatts,” he says. “People are increasingly realizing that the next major bottleneck is the infrastructure itself — it’s data centers, it’s energy — that’s one of the key pain points for this industry.”
Volozh as CEO is not the only similarity between Yandex and Nebius. Of the 1,300 people now working in Europe for the new company, “many of them” previously worked at Yandex in Russia, Volozh says. He also plans to repeat the same formula that made Yandex so successful: Nebius has units dedicated to autonomous driving, data labeling and educational technology. “We hope that this AI cloud [business] will be our main source of income at the beginning and will give us the opportunity to develop other things,” explains Volozh.