Nebius Triples AI GPU Capacity in Finland, Investing $1 Billion in European AI Infrastructure

Yandex N : Nebius to triple capacity at Finland data center to 75 MW

Amsterdam, October 8, 2024 - Nebius (NASDAQ:NBIS), a leading AI infrastructure company, today announced that it will triple the capacity of its data center in Mäntsälä, Finland. The current expansion phase will enable Nebius to place up to 60,000 GPUs at the Mäntsälä location alone, with annual revenue potential of over USD 1 billion at full capacity utilization. The expansion of the Finnish data center - a state-of-the-art location with strong green credentials - is part of Nebius's program to invest more than USD 1 billion in AI infrastructure in Europe by mid-2025. The program also includes investments in build-to-suit data centers at greenfield sites primarily in Europe, as well as colocations, such as the recently announced GPU cluster in Paris. Andrey Korolenko, Head of Infrastructure at Nebius, said: "Tripling capacity at our flagship site in Finland is an important step in our build-out of best-in-class AI infrastructure in Europe. Our data center at Mäntsälä is our 'home base' and showcases our ambition and the technical capabilities of the Nebius team, as well as our approach to adopting sustainability principles in our infrastructure. The capacity we are adding here during this expansion phase will enable us to better serve growing demand from AI builders globally." Nebius is already one of the leading providers of GPU capacity in Europe through the Mäntsälä data center. The expansion in Finland will include deployment of NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs, which will be available to customers from November, in addition to already installed NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs that form the backbone of Nebius's fleet of NVIDIA GPUs. Nebius will also be one of the first providers in Europe to bring the state-of-the-art, energy-efficient NVIDIA Blackwell platform to customers in 2025. The data center at Mäntsälä deploys innovative technological solutions that help to reduce its environmental footprint, reflecting Nebius's approach to adopting sustainability principles in its infrastructure. These include hardware optimized for intensive workloads, energy-efficient supercomputing, advanced cooling and heat recovery systems. With a power usage effectiveness (PUE) as low as 1.1 under high IT loads, the data center significantly outperforms the global average of 1.58. It also utilizes free cooling, reducing reliance on chillers and refrigerants, and incorporates a heat recovery system to repurpose server heat for local residential heating. This system currently recovers approximately 20,000 MWh of energy annually, heating the equivalent of 2,500 Finnish homes. Expansion of the data center will further increase the efficiency of the heat recovery program. The Mäntsälä data center is also home to ISEG, among the most powerful supercomputers worldwide in both performance and energy efficiency. With 35.26 GFlops per watt-second, it ranks in the top 25 supercomputers by energy efficiency globally. The facility's innovative design allows for operations at higher server temperatures, up to 40°C, contributing additional energy savings of approximately 15%. Nebius is being purpose-built to meet the demands of the global AI industry and leans on deep technical expertise across hardware, software and machine learning. The company's 500+ strong team of engineers has decades of knowledge of building world-class tech infrastructure, as well as an in-house LLM R&D team. The current investment program will enable Nebius to reach a total capacity of tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs to bring its highly differentiated, energy-efficient, complete AI cloud offering to customers worldwide. Nebius is a technology company building full-stack infrastructure to service the explosive growth of the global AI industry, including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools and services for developers. Headquartered in Amsterdam and listed on Nasdaq, the company has a global footprint with R&D hubs across Europe, North America and Israel. Nebius's core business is an AI-centric cloud platform built for intensive AI workloads. With proprietary cloud software architecture and hardware designed in-house (including servers, racks and data center design), Nebius gives AI builders the compute, storage, managed services and tools they need to build, tune and run their models. A Preferred cloud service provider in the NVIDIA Partner Network, Nebius offers high-end infrastructure optimized for AI training and inference. The company boasts a team of over 500 skilled engineers, delivering a true hyperscale cloud experience tailored for AI builders.

Nebius is tripling Nvidia GPU capacity at its AI data centre in Finland

A small village north of Helsinki will soon house around 60,000 highly sought-after Nvidia GPUs "Welcome on board. I have been tasked with taking you to Mäntsälä -- in the middle of nowhere," the minivan driver greets us in the characteristic clear and unhurried intonations of a Finnish native speaker. Mäntsälä is, indeed, in the middle of nowhere. But this kind of location is often where you find collections of some of the most powerful machines of today, humming away behind doors along unpretentious corridors. This includes Nebius' AI data centre, taking shape in the small community an hour's drive or so north of Helsinki. Amsterdam-based Nebius is labelling itself an AI cloud infrastructure company. Its proprietary platform, it says, has been optimised for AI training and inference without performance bottlenecks. "The AI cloud is different from the 'regular' cloud. In the set of tools, in the applications, yes, but the people who use it are also different," says Nebius' head of product and infrastructure, Andrey Korolenko. The would-be European AI infrastructure force has begun amassing a tremendous amount of compute. Today, it announced that it will triple the Mäntsälä capacity to up to 60,000 Nvidia GPUs. Precisely, this entails deployment of Nvidia's H200 GPUs, available from November, in addition to already installed H100s. Nebius is also one of the launch partners for Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell platform. The Blackwell GB200 will enter mass production in December this year. Korolenko states that whenever the first unit ships (currently slated for Q1 2025), Nebius will also have it "in a matter of weeks." While others are toiling away to close the gap to Nvidia, the latter's hardware (along with its CUDA platform) is still the gold standard for AI training and inference. Nebius' core business is to offer time on its GPUs to everyone from app developers and companies optimising foundation models for their own businesses to AI model tuners and builders, from pre-training to inference, with different levels of support for different levels of skill. The company has 400+ engineers in its employ, and customers already include the likes of Mistral AI, Genesis Therapeutics, Recraft, and Jetbrains. Nebius has built custom racks for its Nvidia hardware. "We are doing it [building the data centre] from the ground up," Korolenko says. "If you build it, you can just adjust it," he adds, addressing the evolving nature of chips along with all the infrastructure requirements this entails. During our visit, a large batch of racks has just arrived from the manufacturer in Taiwan, and Nebius crew are in the process of unpacking them from their boxes. At the mention of Taiwan, supply chain flags immediately pop up, and it is not long before the question of "What will happen to you in the event of a 'reunification' in the South China Sea?" arises. "What will happen to the world in this case?," Korolenko muses, sounding rather stoic. The data centre also houses ISEG, which currently ranks as the 19th fastest supercomputer in the world, and the fastest commercially available in Europe. With 35.26 GFlops per watt-second, it has also made it to number 24 on the Green Top500 list. The build-out of Mäntsälä is part of a plan to splurge a total of $1bn across Europe by mid-2025, including opening an additional three data centres across the continent (as well as one in an as-of-yet undecided location in North America). This includes a recent addition in Paris, a colocation deployment based at Equinix's PA10 campus. The site, located in the Saint-Denis district, has an urban farm on the roof, and heat from its servers was used to heat the Olympic pool during the 2024 summer games. At its Mäntsälä data centre, Nebius provides heating for about 2,000 homes. A feature that, if replicable, makes the company's presence an attractive proposition for other remote locations eager to up their green credentials. Nebius' data centre currently only utilises air to cool its servers. This will change with the addition of the later GPU models. What will not change is the amount of power that will go back towards heating the neighbouring town -- the percentage, approximately 70%, may even increase when deploying a liquid cooling system. In fact, with the expansion, Nebius will export more heat than the village of Mäntsälä requires. You may wonder how come you have not heard of a company with 400 engineers able to get a hold of tens of thousands of highly coveted Nvidia GPUs up until now. Nebius recently emerged from the European remnants of Yandex (which had a long-term relationship with the GPU maker) following the company's high-profile divestment from Russia. One of the things to come out of that laborious process, other than the Mäntsälä data centre, was a few billion dollars in cash. This is currently fueling the rollout of what could end up being a global force in AI infrastructure. As a result of the legacy from Yandex, Nebius Group is listed on NASDAQ. The group also encompasses data business Toloka, upskilling edtech platform TripleTen, and autonomous driving technology unit Avride. However, its shares are not currently trading. Earlier this month, it announced it had enlisted Goldman Sachs as its financial advisor with a view to recommence trading further down the line. Nebius is owned by Yandex founder Arkady Volozh, who has publicly criticised Russia's war in Ukraine. However, along with the Mäntsälä data centre, Nebius has likely also inherited a certain degree of suspicion due to its origins. The company has moved its employees out of Russia, essentially evacuating thousands of people including whole families to locations outside of the country in 2022. The company does not allow its employees to work from inside Russia should they go back and visit. It has also had to go through rigorous vetting from EU authorities to receive approval for the divestment deal. Its execs, who had to leave behind what they had spent decades building, seem, perhaps understandably, tired of answering questions related to Russia while trying to build something new elsewhere. However, given the critical infrastructure nature of data centres, they might have to practise patience while they field such questions for some time to come.