The billionaire Arkady Volozh, generally known 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 don’t have friction with the climate. What occurs if it’s raining? I have to 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 complicated negotiations with the Kremlin, promoting off elements of the enterprise nonetheless primarily based in Russia, together with the search engine.
For the famed Russian web large, Yandex’s Dutch guardian firm (Yandex NV) was pressured 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 staff was capable of salvage elements of Yandex that had been already primarily based overseas, together with 4 enterprise items targeted on AI. These are the property that shall be rebranded and became what Volozh hopes will develop into one of many main AI infrastructure corporations on the earth.
“This life is completely different,” Volozh says, of his new position as CEO of Nebius. “It feels excellent to be free and to begin one thing new.”
On Monday, sitting in an workplace in Amsterdam, Volozh doesn’t need to discuss politics. He desires to give attention to his brand-new venture. The principle a part of Nebius’ enterprise shall be its cloud division, and Volozh desires to supply AI builders entry to Massive Tech–fashion infrastructure with out the conflicting curiosity of the US giants which can be 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 middle in Finland—the place it plans to triple capability this 12 months—and is constructing a number of others from scratch with “lots of 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. “Persons are understanding an increasing number of that the subsequent major bottleneck is the infrastructure itself—it’s the information facilities, the vitality—this is among the key chokepoints for this trade.”
Volozh as CEO is just not 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 duplicate the identical method that made Yandex so successful: Nebius has items devoted to self-driving, knowledge labeling, and schooling tech. “We hope that this AI cloud [business] shall be our major income supply for the start and it’ll give us a possibility to develop different issues,” Volozh explains.
