The European operations of ‘Russia’s Google,’ Yandex, have been renamed as Nebius Group and pivoted to focus on AI.
The Nasdaq-listed tech giant, which has in the past been referred to as “Russia’s Google,” had been looking for an exit strategy for its Russian operations since the war in Ukraine broke out two years ago.
Earlier this year the company agreed to sell its Russian operations to local management and investment firms. The Amsterdam-based firm – now renamed Nebius Group – retained the company’s Finnish data center, Nebius AI unit, as well as data firm Toloka AI, edtech provider TripleTen, and autonomous driving firm Avride.
In an overview released by the company this week, the newly-christened Nebius said it was “building one of the largest commercially available Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure businesses, based in Europe.”
The company said it was offering an AI-centric cloud platform built for intensive AI workloads, and was building full-stack infrastructure to service the growth of the global AI industry, including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools and services for developers.
Nebius currently operates one data center in Finland. Located in Mäntsälä, Uusimaa, the 40MW facility launched around 2014. It also exports heat to a local district heating network.
The site is home to the ISEG supercomputer; a 46.54 petaflops system equipped with Intel Xeon CPUs and Nvidia H100 GPUs. It is currently 16th on the Top500’s list of most powerful supercomputers.
The company aims to expand the Finnish facility as it expands its GPU capacity.
“In addition to expanding the capacity of our Finnish data center, we plan to build greenfield data centers at new locations primarily in Europe, as well as deploying additional GPU capacity at colocation data centers with modified architecture to reduce installation time,” the company said.
“All these together will allow us to reach a total capacity of tens of thousands of GPUs.”
The company – which went public in 2011 – aims to retain its listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The move, Nebious said, will provide access to capital on favorable terms.
“We see a significant opportunity to invest in building the leading AI infrastructure player in Europe, with a multi-billion annual revenue potential,” the company said. “This will require substantial capital investments, for which we expect to draw on a variety of funding sources including Nebius Group’s balance sheet as well as public and private equity or debt.”
Nebius currently has a total cash of approximately $2.5 billion and no debt. It is targeting annual recurring revenues of $200 million within 6-9 months.
The company lists potential competitors as Coreweave, Lambda Labs, Together.ai, and DeepInfra, as well as hyperscalers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle.
Along with CEO Arkady Volozh, Nebius is led by chief business officer Roman Chernin, chief product and infrastructure officer Andrey Korolenko, and chief operating officer Ophir Nave.
Nebius also said it is developing a new proprietary platform to replace existing legacy IP. Migration to the new platform and the phase-out of the legacy stack is expected by Q4 2024.
“The new platform has a redesigned architecture and software stack that enables efficient scaling across multiple data centers, and aims to dramatically reduce delivery timelines from quarters to weeks,” the company said. “Built on open-source technologies, it leverages the cloud and infrastructure expertise of our core engineering team, and our ability to balance in-house development with acquiring solutions from the ecosystem, ensuring that the resulting product meets the ever-growing requirements of AI engineers.”
The surviving Yandex entity in Russia operates five data centers across the country. The newest, a 63MW site in Kaluga Oblast 200 miles south of Moscow, was due to come online last year. Its four other facilities are based in Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, and Mytishchi.
Yandex's Yandex.Cloud service launched in 2018. It was due to expand to Germany, but these plans were seemingly dropped in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish data center was also forced to run off power from its diesel generators for an extended time after its provider canceled an energy contract.
A number of Yandex assets – including the data center – were frozen when founder Arkadi Volozh was placed on an EU sanctions list. He has since been removed. The group’s Finnish data center is owned by Global DC – previously known as Yandex Oy.
The original Yandex search engine launched in Russia in 1997.
