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Nebius, the company formerly known as Yandex that’s now focused on cloud infrastructure for AI uses (aka “AI compute”), is to begin trading on the public markets once again — more than two years after the Nasdaq halted trading due to economic sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2022.
The Netherlands-based company is vying to become one of Europe’s leading players in the burgeoning “GPU-as-a-service” space, and sits in a somewhat unique position — it is a startup in many ways as it’s starting out afresh as a new business, but being a public company means that anyone can invest in it as an alternative to the usual U.S. hyperscalers such as Alphabet or Microsoft.
Founded in 1997, most people know Yandex as the “Google of Russia,” building everything from search engines and advertising products, to maps and autonomous vehicles. Yandex’s core market was very much its domestic Russia plus a handful of neighboring countries, however its parent was a Dutch holding organization called Yandex N.V. which went public on the Nasdaq in 2011, followed by a secondary listing three years later on the Moscow Exchange.
Yandex N.V. was doing well as a public company, reaching a valuation of $31 billion at the end of 2021 before the Russia-Ukraine conflict kickstarted a series of global sanctions against companies in the region, and also individuals. Yandex co-founder and CEO Arkady Volozh was forced to resign after the European Union placed him on a sanctions list, although he was removed from the list in March 2024 which paved the way for his return as CEO of the next version of Yandex N.V.
That next version is Nebius and its business is based on one of Yandex N.V.’s few remaining assets outside of Russia: a Finnish data center and AI cloud business called Nebius AI. The new entity formally emerged back in July, outlining its plans to be a “European AI compute leader,” similar to something like CoreWeave — a company that is also in the midst of expanding into Europe, raising a ton of equity and debt en-route.
While the Nasdaq had said in 2022 that it would delist Yandex and several other Russian-affiliated companies, Yandex appealed and the Nasdaq agreed to maintain its listing — but keep a halt on trading as it went about severing its Russian ties. With those ties terminated earlier this year, and $2 billion in the bank from selling its Russian assets, Volozh said at the time that he intended to continue Nebius as a public company, as it was an easier and cheaper way to access capital, in what is a very capital intensive business.
“Our ambition is to build one of the world’s largest specialist AI infrastructure businesses,” Volozh said in a statement. “This requires access to technological expertise, graphics processing units and capital. These are exactly what we have.”
Nebius said its Class A ordinary shares will resume trading on Monday, October 21, 2024.
