Nebius, the AI infrastructure company spun out of Yandex, has secured new equity funding to fuel its expansion plans.
The company this week announced that it has entered into definitive agreements for a $700 million private placement financing from a group of institutional and accredited investors, including participation from private equity firm Accel, Nvidia, and certain accounts managed by Orbis Investments.
The financing will support Nebius’ plans to build out its full-stack AI infrastructure – including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools and services for developers
Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said: “The foundation of our business is our expertise in building advanced technology infrastructure. We have demonstrated the scale of our ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out across two continents.
"This strategic financing gives us additional firepower to do it faster and on a larger scale. I’m grateful to our investors for the trust they have placed in us – our team is ready to deliver.”
Nebius was formed over the summer after the European operations of Yandex were split off from its Russian operations. The Amsterdam-based part of the firm retained the company’s Finnish data center, its Nebius AI unit, as well as data firm Toloka AI, edtech provider TripleTen, and autonomous driving firm Avride.
The company plans to triple the capacity of the Finnish data center, planning to place upwards of 60,000 GPUs at the facility and grow its capacity from 25MW to 75MW.
It has also pledged to invest upwards of $1 billion in AI infrastructure in Europe by mid-2025, plans which will see it develop build-to-suit data centers at greenfield sites and colocations, in addition to its recently announced GPU cluster in an Equinix data center in Paris.
Nebius recently announced an expansion into the US, leasing space at a former printing press in Kansas City, Missouri, that is being into a data center.
The fundraising comes after Nebius resumed trading on the Nasdaq. Yandex’s shares on the exchange were suspended following sanctions against Russian-affiliated companies after the invasion of Ukraine. The company has also canceled a share-buyback scheme after its re-listed shares surpassed the offer in the buyback.
