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Nebius runs data centers full of AI computers and rents them out by the hour to companies that need serious computing power.
Nebius is a seller of artificial intelligence computing power. It builds and operates data centers packed with expensive chips, then rents access to those chips to other companies that want to train AI models, run AI apps, or do heavy data crunching but don't want to buy the hardware themselves. Think of it as a landlord for the most expensive machines in the world.
The core product is called AI cloud. A customer — often an AI startup or a company building its own models — pays Nebius for blocks of computing time on high-end Nvidia graphics chips, sold hourly or by the month. Nebius competes with the big cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, but tries to win on a simple pitch: more of the newest chips, available sooner, with less bureaucratic friction than the giants. It also offers tools around the chips, like storage and the software that helps teams manage training runs, because raw hardware alone isn't very useful. The company has an unusual history. It was born from the wreckage of Yandex, once called "Russia's Google." After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Yandex's Dutch parent sold off its Russian assets and reinvented itself under a new name, Nebius. It listed on NASDAQ, and Nvidia, the chipmaker at the center of the AI boom, took a stake in the company — a strong signal for customers and investors alike.
Yandex began in 1997 as a search engine, long before anyone thought of it as an AI cloud company. A decade later, the founders set up a Dutch parent company, Yandex N.V., to hold the business. And inside that search company, starting in 2018, a small cloud effort took root — the seed of everything that came later.
In 2011, Yandex sold shares to the public on NASDAQ and raised $1.3 billion — the biggest dot-com IPO since Google in 2004. The Dutch holding company was now a public company, years before it had anything to do with AI clouds.
Then came February 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions hit, and Nasdaq halted trading in Yandex shares; the stock had been worth $31 billion at the end of 2021. A year later Nasdaq moved to delist the company, but Yandex appealed and won by arguing it was restructuring. The shares stayed frozen — and the company's future hung on what that restructuring would look like.
In July 2024, the answer arrived: Yandex N.V. sold all its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors and kept only the businesses outside Russia. What remained included the cloud and AI unit, plus Toloka, Avride, TripleTen and a data center in Finland. That leftover pile became Nebius Group — an AI infrastructure company staffed by over a thousand former Yandex people.
The company renamed itself Nebius Group N.V. in August 2024, and Arkady Volozh — the Yandex co-founder who had been taken off the EU sanctions list after condemning the war — came back as CEO. The NASDAQ listing survived too, and trading resumed in October under the ticker NBIS.
When the stock started trading again, the market had to guess what this strange leftover company was worth. It settled far below the $18 billion it had carried before the freeze, bouncing between roughly $3.5 billion and $4.75 billion. Volozh's read: it had stabilized above the cost of the assets, which meant the market believed a real business could be built.
In December 2024, Nebius raised $700 million from private investors, including Nvidia, which took a small stake, and Accel Partners. The money went into an AI cloud platform with GPU clusters in Finland and Paris and a push into the U.S. Nvidia's backing would keep coming back as a vote of confidence in Nebius's GPU infrastructure.
In September 2025, Nebius landed its first major corporate customer: a Microsoft agreement worth roughly $17 to $19 billion. The contract gave Nebius the confidence to borrow money and marked its arrival as a supplier to the biggest cloud companies. It also set the pattern — big, long-term capacity commitments that paid for the buildout.
A year later, worry about debt that started at rival CoreWeave spread across the AI cloud upstarts, and Nebius stock fell about 23% from the end of September. Elon Musk warned that the two hundred-plus neoclouds faced what he called guppy-level death and consolidation as debt markets tightened. Nebius pointed to over $40 billion in investment-grade long-term contracts with Microsoft and Meta as its shield.
Then the doubts got answered. In March 2026, Nvidia announced a $2 billion equity investment in Nebius and a partnership on AI factories and agentic AI, and Meta signed a contract worth up to about $27 billion for AI infrastructure on top of the Microsoft deal. Nebius raised its 2026 spending plan to $20–25 billion and aimed for at least 4 gigawatts of contracted power — no longer a leftover, but an AI-native hyperscaler.
The business is capital-hungry and risky. Building data centers means spending enormous sums on chips and buildings before a single customer pays a euro, and the company is racing against deep-pocketed rivals who can undercut it. Still, demand for AI computing has been so fierce that even smaller players can fill capacity quickly. The bet is that the AI buildout keeps outrunning supply, and Nebius earns its place by being fast and focused on AI rather than everything under the sun.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026