Earlier this week, Nebius, an Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure company, secured $700 million in oversubscribed equity financing from investors, including Accel, NVIDIA, and accounts managed by Orbis Investments. The freshly injected capital will accelerate the development of Nebius’ full-stack AI infrastructure, including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools supporting AI developers.
The investment also plays a crucial role in Nebius’ global expansion strategy, particularly in the US. With NVIDIA GPU clusters installed in key locations such as Kansas City, San Francisco, Dallas, and New York City, the company caters to the growing demand for AI infrastructure in these regions. Additionally, Nebius plans to triple the capacity of its flagship data centre in Finland and has added a colocation site in Paris, further strengthening its global presence.
Tech Funding News investigated Nebius’ recent developments. Here are three things to know about this AI infrastructure company.
Behind Nebius: How ex-CEO of Yandex addresses Europe’s “infrastructure deficit”
Arkady Volozh, co-founder and former CEO of Yandex (until 2022), identified a critical gap in AI technology growth. Through Nebius, Volozh aims to address Europe’s “infrastructure deficit” by providing robust, scalable solutions for AI workloads. The European Investment Bank estimates that economic infrastructure investment needs for energy, transport, water, sanitation, and telecoms reach €688 billion annually. Social infrastructure requires an additional €142 billion annually for health, education, and social housing.
Nebius emerged in July 2024 when a $5.4 billion deal split Yandex’s domestic and international assets. Following its return to Nasdaq trading, the company unveiled its strategic vision. It plans to issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at USD 21.00 per share — a 3% premium above the volume-weighted average price.
The company’s full-stack AI infrastructure combines hardware, software, cloud engineering, and machine learning expertise. Its core team of 400 engineers brings extensive experience building world-class tech infrastructure, working alongside an in-house large language model R&D team. Volozh plans to expand Nebius by establishing new data centres across Europe and the United States to meet the growing global demand for AI infrastructure.
With the support of NVIDIA and other investors, Nebius is expanding its AI infrastructure globally. By mid-2025, it plans to invest over $1 billion in AI infrastructure in Europe, including developing build-to-suit data centres and colocations.
Partnership with NVIDIA powers AI-Native platform
In October 2024, Nebius became a preferred cloud service provider in the NVIDIA Partner Network, gaining access to advanced GPU technology, including the latest H100 and H200 Tensor Core GPUs. Speaking specifically, the H200 Tensor Core GPU offers 1.8x larger memory and 1.4x higher bandwidth than the H100, making it ideal for handling larger model sizes and datasets. In fact, it results in up to a 45% performance improvement over the H100 in specific AI workloads.
The company then launched an AI-Native cloud platform for intensive AI workloads, managing the complete machine learning lifecycle — from data processing and training to fine-tuning and inference — in one environment. This platform, powered by NVIDIA’s accelerated computing technology, is a leap in AI development, offering AI developers a robust cloud experience.
The new Nebius AI Studio inference service provides app builders access to open-source models, including Llama 3.1 and Mistral families, in a user-friendly environment, featuring among the lowest price-per-token in the market.
Nebius’ ecosystem – Toloka AI, TripleTen, and Avride
Beyond cloud services, Nebius is expanding into complementary businesses. Analysts who conducted a sum-of-the-parts analysis valued Nebius’ businesses at $2.11 billion in July 2024, rising to $4.7 billion ($23.6 per share), including cash reserves and minority interests.
For instance, Toloka AI is a data partner for all stages of generative AI development, from training to evaluation, that provides high-quality data annotation and generation services, which are crucial for training AI models. At the same time, Avride develops autonomous driving technology for self-driving vehicles and delivery robots. With $375 million in funding from Yandex and Uber, it has achieved 10 million autonomous miles and 200,000 deliveries. The technology operates globally, with vehicles and robots sharing solutions for continuous improvement.
Nebius’s other venture is TripleTen, an edtech platform specialising in reskilling and upskilling individuals for successful tech careers. Fortune magazine already named it the Best Software Bootcamp in the US. The platform offers affordable, high-quality training through a blend of boot camp and MOOC formats, with course content developed in-house.
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