Our Investment in Nebius: Critical Infrastructure for AI Explorers

The AI wave is reshaping industries and driving innovation in all aspects of life—from strengthening mission-critical processes to generating random images for fun. The common thread behind all this is our dependence on reliable, scalable infrastructure to power AI workloads. Training and inference require immense computational resources, and AI platforms built on top of a GPU cloud have become a foundational pillar to fuel this era of rapid innovation. 

Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Nebius, a full-stack AI-native platform built for intensive AI & ML workloads. While Nebius may be a new name to some, there is nothing green about this team. For years, they honed their craft, building one of the top infrastructures at scale and gaining a reputation as some of the best hardware and software engineers globally. With this background, Nebius is notable for its ability to deliver a vertically integrated solution that is owned, operated, and endlessly optimized from the data center to the cloud platform.

We’ve been fortunate to have known the Nebius team since its early days. Our founder, Jim Swartz, introduced us to Nebius founder Arkady Volozh as he put together the business plan. While Arkady’s track record speaks for itself—founding and scaling Yandex to over $30bn in market cap—what immediately stood out to us was his drive to go again and his quiet confidence that this time will be bigger. For over a year, we have followed the admittedly unique story of Nebius, a global team of some 400 engineers with significant resources to allocate to growth and deep industry relationships but with the mentality and hunger of a startup. After numerous meetings in SF, London, Amsterdam, and even a trip to the snowy town of Mäntsälä, Finland, to visit their first data center, we found ourselves sharing in that same quiet confidence over what they could achieve.

We believe that software will increasingly become a key purchase criterion, and the demands will expand. Further, as the market broadens to the enterprise, we expect that a full-stack solution will become necessary. Whether delivering bare metal at scale or the full AI platform, Nebius is well-positioned to serve all ends of the market. Finally, as data sovereignty is increasingly a priority for nations, Nebius’ strong foothold in Europe and the US aligns with the need for trusted, localized solutions. 

AI infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the core Nebius AI-native cloud business, Nebius Group is home to exceptional talent driving innovation across adjacent domains. These teams have helped develop leading technology that has formed independent companies, such as Avride (delivery robots and robotaxis), Clickhouse (open-source column-based DBMS), Toloka (data for genAI), and TripleTen (edtech).

We are excited to partner with Arkady, this group of talented, humble engineers and operators, and our friends at Nvidia. In a world where every company will leverage AI, Nebius is positioned to become an important utility of the AI age.