Nebius Raises $700 Million for AI Infrastructure Expansion, Backed by Nvidia and Others

Nebius Raises USD 700 Million to Accelerate AI Infrastructure Expansion, Backed by Nvidia

Updated financial outlook: Forecasting USD 750 million to 1 billion ARR by year-end 2025. AI infrastructure company Nebius Group (Nebius) announced on Monday that it has entered into an agreement to raise USD 700 million in private placement financing from investors, including Nvidia, Accel, and certain accounts managed by Orbis Investments. The financing aims to accelerate Nebius' previously announced plans to expand its AI infrastructure, encompassing large-scale GPU clusters, data centers, and tools and services for developers. The funds will also support the Nebius AI Studio, which offers affordable machine learning services to app developers. Also Read: Swisscom Launches Swiss AI Platform for Businesses in Switzerland Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said: "We have demonstrated the scale of our ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out across two continents. This strategic financing gives us additional firepower to do it faster and on a larger scale." Nebius highlighted that its full-stack AI infrastructure is purpose-built to meet the demands of the global AI industry. Nebius' core AI infrastructure business has around 400 engineers with knowledge of building world-class tech infrastructure, as well as an in-house large language model (LLM) R&D team. The Company is implementing an AI infrastructure build-out strategy that combines investments in build-to-suit data centers at greenfield sites with additional capacity deployments through colocations and the expansion of its existing facilities. Also Read: LG and Tenstorrent Strengthen Partnership to Enhance AI Chip Capabilities The AI-native Nebius GPU cloud is designed to manage the complete ML lifecycle - from data processing and training through to fine-tuning and inference - all in one place. The recently launched Nebius AI Studio inference service expands the Company's offering to app builders, with access to a range of open-source models in a flexible, user-friendly environment at among the lowest price-per-token on the market, the company said. In a statement, Nebius said it would issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at USD 21 per share in the private placement, representing an approximately 3 percent premium to the volume-weighted average price of those shares since trading resumed on Nasdaq. The closing of the private placement is subject to customary closing conditions. Commenting on the transaction, John Boynton, Chairman of the Nebius Board, said, "Based on the strong level of investor engagement and technical dynamics which we have observed following the resumption of trading on Nasdaq, we believe that those shareholders who may have wanted to exit have had an opportunity to do so at a price higher than the maximum repurchase price authorised by shareholders." Also Read: Nvidia Unveils New AI Model Fugatto That Generates Audio from Text and Audio The Board ruled out a previously planned share buyback, opting to reinvest in its AI business, citing strong post-Nasdaq trading activity. Boynton added, "The Board has determined that the best way to maximise value for the Company's shareholders is to invest our capital into our core AI infrastructure business, where the Company believes there is a substantial market opportunity." The company has updated its financial guidance and now expects to achieve an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of USD 750 million to USD 1 billion by the end of 2025. Goldman Sachs served as the placement agent and financial advisor for the transaction.

AI data center builder Nebius raises $700M in funding - SiliconANGLE

coNebius NV, a publicly-traded provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, today announced that it has raised $700 million in funding. The company received the capital through a private placement that saw investors buy about 33.3 million shares for $21 apiece. That represents a 3% premium to Nebius' volume-weighted average stock price. The round included contributions from Nvidia Corp., Accel, Orbis Investments and other backers. Nebius is an Amsterdam-based company that originally functioned as the parent organization of Russian search engine Yandex. It went public on the Nasdaq in 2011 and was suspended from the stock exchange last year. A few weeks ago, the company's shares resumed trading after it offloaded its holdings in Russia. Following the divestiture, Nebius was reportedly left with four businesses. Three of the units provide autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence models and technology for the education sector. The fourth business, which builds data centers, is the focus of the $700 million investment announced today. Nebius said that it will use the capital to grow its data center capacity in the U.S. and other markets. According to the company, the new infrastructure will be optimized to host AI training and inference workloads. Nebius recently announced plans to triple the capacity of an existing data center in Finland to 75 megawatts. One megawatt corresponds to the power consumption of several hundred households. According to the company, the upgrade will enable it to deploy up to 60,000 additional graphics processing units in the facility. The hardware rollout will include an unspecified number of H200 chips. The H200 is an upgraded version of Nvidia Corp.'s bestselling H100 graphics card that includes a faster, higher-capacity memory pool. The upgraded RAM allows AI models to process data faster. Nebius' Finland facility dissipates the heat generated by its servers with a method known as free cooling. It involves using cool air from outside a data center to chill water, which in turn functions as a coolant for the hardware inside. Nebius also built a system that repurposes some server heat to warm local homes. When it detailed the data center upgrade earlier this year, the company also disclosed plans to open three additional facilities. One will be built in North America while the other two are set to be located in Europe. Nebius says that it has already signed letters of intent for the latter projects. Besides building custom data centers, the company also deploys AI hardware in co-location facilities operated by partners. A co-location facility is a data center that hosts infrastructure for multiple organizations. Nebius offers infrastructure alongside a recently launched service called the AI Studio. It provides access to hosted versions of popular open-source models such as the Llama 3.1 large language model series. According to Nebius, customers can process up to 10 million tokens' worth of data per minute. AI Studio is also a focus of the company's product development efforts. Nebius says that it plans to add support for models that can generate images and videos. In conjunction with today's funding announcement, the company upgraded its 2025 revenue forecast to between $750 million and $1 billion. That's up from $500 million to $1 billion before.

Nvidia among investors in $700 million capital raise by AI firm Nebius Group

LONDON (Reuters) - AI infrastructure firm Nebius Group on Monday said it was raising $700 million in a private placement from investors including Nvidia, Accel and some accounts managed by Orbis Investments. Nebius, which emerged in July following a $5.4 billion deal to split the domestic and international assets of Russian internet giant Yandex, is joining a drive to build the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence. Nebius was founded by Arkady Volozh, former founder and CEO of Yandex. Trading in Nasdaq-listed Yandex was suspended soon after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Nebius eventually reviving the listing as part of the asset split. Volozh said the $700 million financing would give Nebius additional firepower to build clusters of graphics processing units (GPUs), cloud platforms and other tools for AI developers faster and on a larger scale. Nebius has so far committed to investing $1 billion by mid-2025, but Volozh said the company could end up investing more. Nebius is leasing data centre space in Kansas City, Missouri, and may expand further in the United States, where more than half of the company's clients are based, Volozh told reporters. In a statement, Nebius said it would issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at a $21 per share in the private placement, representing an approximately 3% premium to the volume-weighted average price of those shares since Nasdaq trading resumed. Nebius said the financing was oversubscribed and raised its annualised run-rate revenue by year-end 2025 to between $750 million and $1 billion, from $500 million at the lower end previously. Nebius also said that it would no longer pursue a share buyback that was approved as the Russia split deal closed and before Nasdaq trading resumed. "Based on the strong level of investor engagement and technical dynamics which we have observed following the resumption of trading on Nasdaq, we believe that those shareholders who may have wanted to exit have had an opportunity to do so at a price higher than the maximum repurchase price authorised by shareholders," Nebius Board Chairman John Boynton said. (Reporting by Alexander Marrow, Editing by Louise Heavens)

European AI infrastructure company Nebius nabs $700M from Nvidia, Accel, others

Nebius, the publicly-traded European AI infrastructure company formerly known as Yandex N.V., has raised $700 million in financing to power its U.S. expansion. The financing included "dozens of very well known investors," according to Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh (pictured above) in a press briefing today. While all the names will eventually come out when the paperwork is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company is only revealing three for now -- these are GPU giant Nvidia, one of the world's most valuable companies; Accel, a Silicon Valley VC firm better known for its earlier-stage investments in private startups; and investment management firm Orbis. The announcement comes some six weeks after Nebius resumed trading on the Nasdaq following a near three-year hiatus imposed due to sanctions against Russian-affiliated companies. The Netherlands-based business had been the holding company of Yandex, "the Google of Russia," and after an extensive divestment process the company emerged as Nebius in July, with plans to offer a "full stack" infrastructure for AI companies spanning data centers, GPU, and related services. Nebius is adopting a hybrid approach to growing its footprint, involving a mix of co-location facilities (shared data centers) which are quicker to set up, and its own "greenfield" sites built from scratch. But this is a heavily capital intensive effort, which is why it's now raising additional funding via a private placement. While Nebius competes with the usual cloud hyperscalers, it's also up against well-financed private players such as CoreWeave which also counts Nvidia as an investor. CoreWeave is in the midst of expanding from the U.S. to Europe, while Nebius is moving in the opposite direction, recently announcing plans for a new GPU cluster at a co-location in Kansas City. Nebius also recently added a co-location site in Paris to its roster, while it's planning to triple the capacity of its fully-owned data center in Finland. No buy-back After the fire sale of its Russian assets earlier this year, Nebius has around $2.2 billion in the bank already -- however, it had ring-fenced a portion of that for a buy-back program in case any existing investors wanted to exit. After all, the Nebius business of 2024 is a totally different entity to the Yandex N.V. entity that they had previously invested in. The offer amounted to a repurchase of up to 81 million Class A shares at a maximum of $10.5 per-share. In the weeks that have followed its reentry to the public markets, however, Nebius's shares have hovered around the $21 mark (give or take), meaning that existing shareholders have had ample opportunity to sell their shares on the public market at well over the buy-back agreement price. Thus, this offer is "no longer warranted," according to Nebius, freeing up even more capital for the company as its expands its data center footprint. So the long and short of all this is that Nebius has in the region of $3 billion to build with, a figure that is still relatively low in terms of how much capital is required to build infrastructure at scale. Which is why Volozh says they are already looking ahead to raising more capital -- be that equity, or debt. "Of course, we will have some revenues that will help, but we will need more capital to build quicker," Volozh told TechCrunch. "It's very capital intensive. Technology and capital are two components of this business -- I don't worry about the technology (side), and the capital, I think, we will be able to raise." As part of its investment, Accel partner Matt Weigand will also be joining Nebius's board of directors, though initially he will only have observer status until he's formally elected at the company's AGM in 2025.

AI firm Nebius nabs $700m in financing to assist US expansion

The company recently resumed Nasdaq trading after selling off its Russian business. Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company Nebius Group has secured $700m in financing to assist its expansion across the US. Among the investors are Nvidia, Accel and Orbis Investments. The publicly traded Dutch company was previously known as Yandex NV. Earlier this year, it announced that it would sell the group's businesses in Russia in a $5.4bn deal. It had owned Yandex, a popular search engine that is considered the equivalent of Google in Russia. The retained businesses then rebranded to Nebius Group and resumed Nasdaq trading in October. According to Nebius, the financing will support its previously announced plans to further build out its full-stack AI infrastructure, including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools and services for developers. The private placement means that Nebius will issue 33.3m in Class A shares at a price per share of $21. The closing of the private placement is subject to customary closing conditions. Additional details regarding the private placement will be included in a Form 6-K to be filed Nebius with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In connection with the private placement, Nebius also announced that its board of directors has granted observer rights to Matt Weigand, a partner at Accel, and that it intends to nominate Weigand for election as a director at the 2025 annual general meeting of shareholders. Nebius' CEO and founder, Arkady Volozh, said that the company has "demonstrated the scale of [its] ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out across two continents". "This strategic financing gives us additional firepower to do it faster and on a larger scale. I'm grateful to our investors for the trust they have placed in us - our team is ready to deliver," Volozh said. John Boynton, chair of the Nebius board, said: "The board has determined that the best way to maximise value for the company's shareholders is to invest our capital into our core AI infrastructure business, where the company believes there is a substantial market opportunity." Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Nvidia, Accel back Netherlands-based AI firm Nebius in $700M deal

Nebius wants to shed its Russian past and build AI infrastructure to power the future Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius, which builds full-stack AI infrastructure for tech firms, has secured $700mn in a private equity deal led by Nvidia, Accel, and asset manager Orbis. The funding comes in the form of a private placement -- when a company sells stocks directly to a private investor instead of on the public market. The deal will see Nebius issue 33.3 million Class A shares at $21 apiece. Nebius, which is the rebranded European arm of "Russia's Google," Yandex, is investing more than $1bn across Europe by mid-2025 as it seeks to cash in on booming demand for AI computing power. It also recently announced plans to build its first GPU cluster in the US. "We have demonstrated the scale of our ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out across two continents," said Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius. "This strategic financing gives us additional firepower to do it faster and on a larger scale." Nebius' expansion strategy includes constructing new custom data centres and expanding existing facilities, like its data centre in Finland which we visited in October. It will also deploy additional capacity through colocation. Volozh aims for Nebius to be a Phoenix rising from the ashes of what remained of Yandex following the company's divestment from Russia earlier this year. The $5.4bn deal constituted the largest corporate exit from the country since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine over two years ago. Nebius' core product is an AI-centric cloud platform for intense AI workloads. The company is also one of the launch partners for Nvidia's fabled Blackwell GPUs, however, this investment does not guarantee that. "The deal is not about the GPUs," Volozh told Bloomberg. "But, of course, it shows our close relationship, which we hope will influence our pipeline." Investors are pouring huge sums of money into AI compute. The global AI infrastructure market size is projected to grow from $46.15bn in 2024 to $356.14bn by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. One competitor to Nebius, US firm CoreWeave, is preparing for an IPO that could put the company, founded in 2017, at a $35bn valuation.

Nebius secures $700 million for AI infrastructure growth, including funds from NVIDIA By Investing.com

Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ:NBIS), an AI infrastructure firm, has secured a strategic equity financing deal worth $700 million, aimed at accelerating the expansion of its full-stack AI infrastructure. The financing round saw contributions from a consortium of institutional and accredited investors, including Accel, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), and Orbis Investments-managed accounts. The investment will bolster Nebius' efforts to enhance its AI infrastructure capabilities, which include large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and developer tools and services. This infrastructure supports AI innovators globally and is designed to manage the complete machine learning lifecycle. Arkady Volozh, Nebius' CEO, expressed gratitude towards investors for their trust and emphasized the company's commitment to delivering on its expansion plans. The company's engineering team, consisting of approximately 400 experts, is set to focus on scaling the technology infrastructure across various markets. Nebius aims to combine investments in build-to-suit data centers and additional capacity deployments to strengthen its infrastructure. Its recently launched Nebius AI Studio inference service provides app builders with access to a selection of open-source models. The company will issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at $21.00 each, a slight premium to the recent average trading price. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and will be detailed in a forthcoming SEC Form 6-K filing. The board has also opted against repurchasing Class A shares, a decision influenced by the robust trading dynamics post-resumption of trading on Nasdaq. Instead, Nebius will focus on investing in its core business, where it sees significant market opportunities. With this strategic financing and the shift in capital allocation strategy, Nebius now anticipates achieving an annualized run-rate revenue between $750 million and $1 billion by the end of 2025. Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) Bank Europe SE is the sole placement agent for the private placement, also serving as the financial advisor for Nebius' strategic review. The securities offered have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933 and are subject to specific exemptions from registration requirements. Nebius plans to file a resale registration statement with the SEC following its 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F to enable the resale of the newly issued Class A shares. This report is based on a press release statement.

Former Yandex AI group raises $700mn from investors including Nvidia

Nebius, the artificial intelligence infrastructure group that was formed from Yandex's operations outside Russia earlier this year, has raised $700mn from investors including chipmaker Nvidia to capitalise on exploding demand for AI data centres. The new equity financing, via a private placement, comes six weeks after trading in Nebius' stock resumed on Nasdaq, following its split in July from Yandex, Russia's biggest internet group. Other investors involved in the deal announced on Monday include Silicon Valley venture firm Accel. Nebius, led by chief Arkady Volozh, a rare Russian businessman to publicly condemn Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and who has become an Israeli citizen, said: "Now we are finalising our journey from the ashes back in July to being a real company with real capital." Nvidia's move to take a stake displayed the "very good and deep relationship" between Nebius and the dominant supplier of AI chips, Volozh said. The company plans to bring Nvidia's new Blackwell series of graphics processing units online in its cloud service next year. "Of course we hope that such a close relationship will help us to get more quotas [of Nvidia chips] and sooner," Volozh added. "It [Nvidia's equity investment] doesn't have a direct relationship to getting the GPUs, the deal is not about the GPUs. But of course it shows our close relationship which we hope will influence our pipelines." Two years after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT kick-started a wave of investment in AI infrastructure, demand for computing capacity to train ever-larger models shows few signs of slowing. Nvidia has said it expects demand to exceed supply of Blackwell for most of next year. Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius is racing to build out new data centres packed with Nvidia's chips to train and run AI systems for clients including French AI group Mistral. It is competing with other so-called AI "neocloud" services such as Nvidia-backed CoreWeave, which has raised more than $9bn in equity and debt to date according to PitchBook, as well as its US rivals Lambda Labs and Crusoe. By focusing on new ways of building data centres that they say are better suited to the requirements of AI, neocloud companies are trying to challenge the dominance of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud computing market. Nebius' biggest data centre is in Mäntsälä, Finland but Volozh told reporters on Monday that the new capital would finance its plans to expand in the US next year, where demand from customers is stronger than in Europe. "This is not the last capital we will be raising," Volozh said, suggesting it could return to the market later next year. "But we are one of only a few public companies [among AI neoclouds] which provides us cheaper access to capital . . . I think we are one of the few or the only one in this new cloud push who has no debt." Shares in US-listed Yandex were suspended in 2022 following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After a protracted negotiation with the Kremlin, Yandex struck a $5.4bn deal in February to sell its core Russian business to a consortium of investors. Nebius is formed from the remainder of Yandex's former international operations. As well as its main focus on AI cloud computing, the group also includes a self-driving car venture, Avride, and an edtech service. At the same time as announcing the new funds, Nebius said it would cancel a planned share buyback, pointing to high volumes since trading resumed on Nasdaq that would have allowed any investors from the Yandex era to exit the stock if they wished to. Following the equity financing Nebius will have more than $3bn in cash. The company said it expects its annual revenue run rate to grow to $750mn-$1bn by the end of next year, up from previous guidance of $500mn-$1bn.

Nvidia Joins $700 Million Deal in Nebius for AI Cloud Services

Nebius Group NV, the technology company rebranded from Russian internet giant Yandex, has raised $700 million from a slate of investors including Nvidia Corp. and Accel Partners LP. With the private placement financing, Nebius will issue 33.3 million shares at $21 each, according to a statement on Monday. The company said it is shelving earlier plans for a share buyback.

Nvida Helps Cloud Group Nebius Raise $700 Million | PYMNTS.com

Dutch cloud computing company Nebius has reportedly raised $700 million from investors including Nvidia. The company, which rebranded from Russian internet company Yandex, has sold that business's search engine and now focuses on cloud-computing services for artificial intelligence (AI) operations, Bloomberg News reported Monday (Dec. 2). CEO Arkady Volozh said the new funding will support the expansion of the company's "GPU clusters" -- a package of specialized AI chips and cloud services found in data centers. Nebius rebranded after selling its Russian business. Yandex's shares on the Nasdaq were suspended when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Nebius, meanwhile, resumed trading in October, Bloomberg said. The report also noted that the funding comes as major investors are funneling vast sums of capital into the tech that supports AI. For example, CoreWeave, which competes with Nebius and has also been backed by Nvidia, is planning a $23 billion public listing. As PYMNTS wrote last month, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has become an crucial tool for chief financial officers (CFOs), who see the technology as vital to their organization's strategic and operational planning. According to a PYMNTS Intelligence report, "Most CFOs See Limited ROI From GenAI, but Boost Its Investment," many CFOs report limited return on investment (ROI) for their AI efforts, even as they increasingly rely on GenAI for medium-impact tasks like financial reporting and data visualizations. In addition, the research found, many companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue are committed to expanding their GenAI investments in the coming year. More recently, PYMNTS examined how chief marketing officers (CMOs) are leveraging GenAI for better customer service. PYMNTS Intelligence data showed that 97% of CMOs surveyed in July found the technology highly effective for this purpose, compared to 72% in April. "This surge underscores how GenAI is optimizing customer service workflows rather than replacing human agents. Automated tools powered by generative AI handle routine queries and requests, freeing customer service teams to focus on complex issues requiring a human touch," PYMNTS wrote. "This balance has proven particularly advantageous in the payments sector, where fast, accurate responses are crucial to maintaining customer trust." In addition, GenAI plays a key role in providing real-time, automated responses to customer queries, though its effectiveness lies in its collaborative potential. "For instance, an AI-driven chatbot might handle initial troubleshooting before escalating unresolved issues to a human representative," PYMNTS wrote. "By acting as a first line of defense, these systems reduce wait times and improve overall customer satisfaction while keeping human expertise in the loop."