Nvidia, Accel again Netherlands-based AI agency Nebius in $700M deal

Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius, which builds full-stack AI infrastructure for tech companies, has secured $700mn in a non-public fairness deal led by Nvidia, Accel, and asset supervisor Orbis. 

The funding comes within the type of a non-public placement — when an organization sells shares on to a non-public investor as an alternative of on the general public market. The deal will see Nebius problem 33.3 million Class A shares at $21 apiece.  

Nebius, which is the rebranded European arm of “Russia’s Google,” Yandex, is investing greater than $1bn throughout Europe by mid-2025 because it seeks to money in on booming demand for AI computing energy. It additionally recently announced plans to construct its first GPU cluster within the US.   

“We now have demonstrated the dimensions of our ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out throughout two continents,” mentioned Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius. “This strategic financing offers us extra firepower to do it sooner and on a bigger scale.”

Nebius’ enlargement technique contains setting up new customized knowledge centres and increasing current services, like its knowledge centre in Finland which we visited in October. It’ll additionally deploy extra capability via colocation. 

Volozh goals for Nebius to be a Phoenix rising from the ashes of what remained of Yandex following the company’s divestment from Russia earlier this 12 months. The $5.4bn deal constituted the biggest company exit from the nation because the begin of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine over two years in the past. 

Nebius’ core product is an AI-centric cloud platform for intense AI workloads. The corporate can be one in all the launch companions for Nvidia’s fabled Blackwell GPUs, nevertheless, this funding doesn’t assure that.

“The deal isn’t in regards to the GPUs,” Volozh advised Bloomberg. “However, after all, it exhibits our shut relationship, which we hope will affect our pipeline.”

Buyers are pouring big sums of cash into AI compute. The worldwide AI infrastructure market dimension is projected to develop from $46.15bn in 2024 to $356.14bn by 2032, in response to Fortune Enterprise Insights. One competitor to Nebius, US agency CoreWeave, is getting ready for an IPO that would put the corporate, based in 2017, at a $35bn valuation.