The billionaire Arkady Volozh, referred to as 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 told 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 large he constructed with the late Ilya Segalovich. Right now 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 large Yandex. Volozh and his staff 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 large, Yandex’s Dutch mother or father firm (Yandex NV) was pressured to just accept a cut-down worth of simply $5 billion, underneath Russian guidelines for western companies attempting to depart the nation. Out of that deal, nevertheless, Volozh’s staff had been in a position to salvage components of Yandex that had been already primarily based overseas, together with 4 enterprise items centered on AI. These are the belongings that shall be rebranded and become what Volozh hopes will develop into one of many main AI infrastructure corporations on the planet.
“This life is completely different,” Volozh says, of his new function as CEO of Nebius. “It feels superb to be free and to begin one thing new.”
On Monday, sitting in an workplace in Amsterdam, Volozh doesn’t wish to speak politics. He desires to concentrate on his brand-new mission. The principle a part of Nebius’ enterprise shall be its cloud division and Volozh desires to supply AI builders entry to massive tech-style infrastructure with out the conflicting curiosity of the US giants which are constructing their very own fashions on the aspect. “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 heart in Finland—the place it plans to triple capability this yr—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 house in tens of knowledge facilities that exist already. “With rented capability, [we] will exceed 100 megawatts,” he says. “Individuals are understanding an increasing number of that the subsequent principal bottleneck is the infrastructure itself—it’s the information facilities, the power—this is without doubt one of the key chokepoints for this trade.”
Volozh as CEO shouldn’t be the one similarity between Yandex and Nebius. Out of the 1,300 folks working for the brand new firm now in Europe, “a lot of them” used to work at Yandex in Russia, Volozh says. He additionally plans to copy the identical system that made Yandex so successful: Nebius has items devoted to self-driving, knowledge labeling, and training tech. “We hope that this AI cloud [business] shall be our principal income supply for the start and it’ll give us a possibility to develop different issues,” Volozh explains.
