Serial entrepreneur Arkady Volozh joins Jennifer Schenker to discuss his remarkable journey from leading the search engine Yandex to establishing his newest company, Nebius, as one of the largest independent AI infrastructure providers.
Volozh built Yandex into “the Google of Russia”, Schenker explains, reaching a peak market cap of $31 billion in 2021, before Russia’s attack on Ukraine forced a dramatic pivot. Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO in July 2022 and launched Nebius two years later in the Netherlands.
“It feels like a startup”, Volozh says. “When the invasion started, half of the Yandex top management and a thousand engineers left the country.” Many of them joined Nebius, he explains, and bring along their expertise of building the infrastructure of gigantic data centers that AI requires.
“On the technology front, we have some of the best engineers in this field, who worked together for decades, who know what they’re doing, what they’re building”, Volozh emphasizes.
Nebius positions itself as part of the “neocloud” movement, which describes independent players competing with major tech giants in the AI infrastructure industry. “We’re a little bit different from the rest”, he notes, because Nebius builds its own data centers, racks, and software stack, allowing for greater efficiency and control.
“We have our own technologies, we’re not buying from different places, we are not the integrator”, Volozh emphasizes. “We build the data centers ourselves. We build them very efficiently with less energy consumption.”
Watch the video for more details about Nebius, as well as the founder’s other other ventures, including Taloka AI, a platform for training AI models, and a reskilling startup that helps workers transition into data-driven roles.
