The billionaire Arkady Volozh, often called the architect of “Russia’s Google,” valued at $30 billion at its peak, has lengthy had an apolitical public persona. “I don’t have friction with the state,” Volozh instructed WIRED in 2017. “Identical to I haven’t got friction with the climate. What occurs if it’s raining? I must construct a service to keep away from the rain.”
Nonetheless, Volozh couldn’t keep away from the rain. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he was focused by EU sanctions personally and compelled to step down from Yandex, the web big he constructed with the late Ilya Segalovich. At the moment the tech billionaire is saying his comeback as CEO of a brand new European AI firm. The Nebius Group is technically a reinvention of Russian web big Yandex. Volozh and his crew have spent the previous two years in advanced negotiations with the Kremlin, promoting off components of the enterprise nonetheless primarily based in Russia, together with the search engine.
For the famed Russian web big, Yandex’s Dutch mother or father firm (Yandex NV) was compelled to simply accept a cut-down worth of simply $5 billion, underneath Russian guidelines for western companies making an attempt to go away the nation. Out of that deal, nonetheless, Volozh’s crew have been in a position to salvage components of Yandex that have been already primarily based overseas, together with 4 enterprise items centered on AI. These are the belongings that can be rebranded and was what Volozh hopes will change into one of many main AI infrastructure firms on the earth.
“This life is completely different,” Volozh says, of his new position as CEO of Nebius. “It feels superb to be free and to start out one thing new.”
On Monday, sitting in an workplace in Amsterdam, Volozh doesn’t need to speak politics. He desires to deal with his brand-new venture. The primary a part of Nebius’ enterprise can be its cloud division and Volozh desires to supply AI builders entry to huge tech-style infrastructure with out the conflicting curiosity of the US giants which are constructing their very own fashions on the facet. “We’re constructing infrastructure for the individuals who construct the fashions to construct AI,” says Volozh, explaining the plan behind Nebius.
Nebius owns one knowledge middle in Finland—the place it plans to triple capability this 12 months—and is constructing a number of others from scratch with “a whole bunch of megawatts capability every,” Volozh says, emphasizing the corporate already has billions in capital and plans to lift extra.
Till Nebius’ new knowledge facilities are constructed—primarily in Europe—the corporate is renting area in tens of information facilities that exist already. “With rented capability, [we] will exceed 100 megawatts,” he says. “Individuals are understanding increasingly that the subsequent essential bottleneck is the infrastructure itself—it’s the information facilities, the power—this is among the key chokepoints for this trade.”
Volozh as CEO just isn’t the one similarity between Yandex and Nebius. Out of the 1,300 individuals working for the brand new firm now in Europe, “lots of them” used to work at Yandex in Russia, Volozh says. He additionally plans to duplicate the identical method that made Yandex so successful: Nebius has items devoted to self-driving, knowledge labeling, and training tech. “We hope that this AI cloud [business] can be our essential income supply for the start and it’ll give us a possibility to develop different issues,” Volozh explains.