① Dutch ai infrastructure company Nebius Group NV announced it has secured $0.7 billion in financing, with investors including Accel and nvidia; ② The funding will be used to build a full-stack ai infrastructure, including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and developer tools; ③ Before July this year, Nebius Group was still known as “Yandex NV.”
Finance Associated Press reported on December 3 (Editor Zhao Hao) that on Monday (December 2 local time), the Dutch ai infrastructure company Nebius Group NV announced on its official website that it has reached a final agreement with selected institutions and investors to secure $0.7 billion in financing.
Source: Nebius official website
Nebius stated that the investors include the venture capital firm Accel, chip giant nvidia, and some accounts managed by Orbis Investments. According to the plan, Nebius will issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at a price of $21.00 per share.
According to Nebius, the financing will support the company's previously announced plans to further build full-stack ai infrastructure for global ai pioneers, which will include large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools and services for developers.
Nebius's official website shows that most of the GPU resources used for the company's ai services are nvidia products, including H100, H200, and L40s. The press release stated that the company will implement a strategic plan for building ai infrastructure, which may indicate the purchase of more nvidia ai chips.
As a result of this news, Nebius's stocks traded on the nasdaq (stock code: NBIS) rose nearly 27% to $27.9, the highest level since February 24, 2022. However, it should be noted that this stock had only been re-listed on the US market just over a month ago.
Nebius daily chart
Before July of this year, the name of Nebius Group was still "Yandex NV", and its subsidiary was the Russian technology giant known as the "Russian Google", Yandex. In addition to search, its business scope also covers advertising, e-commerce, ride-hailing, as well as cloud computing, data labeling, and autonomous driving.
In July, Yandex's business in Russia was sold to a Russian consortium for 5.4 billion dollars. This is also the largest exit of a Western firm from the Russian market since the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The company retained its international key businesses under the name Nebius and inherited its listing qualification on nasdaq.
Reports indicate that Arkady Volozh, the founder of Yandex, who was once sanctioned by the EU, took 400 top engineers with experience in developing ai, creating cloud computing services, and infrastructure from Yandex, and became the CEO of Nebius.
Yandex's delivery robots.
In a recent statement, Volozh wrote, "The foundation of our business is our expertise in building advanced technology infrastructure. We have demonstrated our ambition by launching ai infrastructure construction across two continents."
"This strategic financing provides us with additional ammunition to achieve this goal faster and on a larger scale. I appreciate the trust of our investors - our team is ready to achieve the goals."
Volozh stated that he hopes Nebius can acquire the highly anticipated Blackwell chip from nvidia early, "but this investment does not guarantee that." He added, "This financing indicates our close relationship, and we hope it will impact our product line."
Volozh also mentioned that he expects Nebius to conduct another round of financing in 2025, possibly larger than this one.