In 2025, as the AI computing power arms race reached a fever pitch, a little-known Dutch company, Nebius, made a stunning impact by securing super orders worth $19.4 billion from Microsoft and $3 billion from Meta, shocking the global tech community. Within just three months, this "newcomer" company not only saw its revenue surge by 355% year-on-year but also its stock price jumped 210%. It even boldly claimed that by 2026, it would build a 2.5 GW computing cluster—equivalent to deploying 1 to 1.25 million NVIDIA GPUs—with annual power consumption approaching one-fifth of the Three Gorges Dam's output.

However, Nebius is not an overnight startup. It was reborn from Russia's internet giant Yandex. Its founder, Arkady Volozh, a 61-year-old former Soviet small-town youth, once built what was called "the Russian Google," Yandex. After Yandex NV was delisted from Nasdaq due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Volozh made a strategic cut: he sold off Russia's core assets for $5.4 billion but secretly retained overseas technological resources—including the autonomous driving company Avride, AI data platform Toloka, edtech company TripleTen, and the AI cloud platform Nebius AI located in Finland.

In June 2024, after the spin-off, Yandex NV officially changed its name to Nebius, moved its headquarters to Amsterdam, and embarked on a second entrepreneurial journey. Volozh did not choose a private path but insisted on maintaining its public company status—he knew that in the extremely capital-intensive field of AI infrastructure, the public market is the only efficient channel to obtain low-cost, large-scale financing.

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The real strength of Nebius comes from its deep engineering roots. The company inherited more than a thousand top engineers from Yandex, and the team has designed data centers, servers, motherboards, and even connectors on its own over the past 20 years, possessing full-stack vertical integration capabilities. More importantly, it maintains a deep partnership with NVIDIA, which has been established since the Yandex era. "They have known us for a long time and understand our capabilities," Volozh admitted. This relationship made it one of the first cloud providers in Europe to deploy Blackwell Ultra GPUs.

In terms of business model, Nebius has avoided the common dilemma of new cloud providers becoming mere "GPU landlords." It provides end-to-end full-stack services from hardware, IaaS, AI platforms, to operations: building data centers in multiple countries, integrating open-source model ecosystems, supporting mainstream orchestration tools like SkyPilot and MLFlow, and including NVIDIA NIM microservices frameworks, enabling customers to quickly deploy large model applications. This high-value-added capability has allowed it to stand out in a homogenized competition.

Faced with capital expenditures reaching hundreds of billions of dollars, Nebius has devised a clever "three-step" strategy: using just 1% of the funds to secure land and electricity, 18-20% to build "shell" data centers, and strictly initiating GPU purchases based on real orders—“no rabbit, no eagle”—maintaining control over risks during rapid expansion.

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Today, its client list is impressive: in addition to Microsoft and Meta, it includes German AI unicorn Black Forest Lab (the team behind the Flux model), and Anysphere, the parent company of the programming tool Cursor. Its subsidiaries have also received significant investments from Bezos Fund and Uber, showing increasing synergy effects in the ecosystem.

Despite rising current liabilities of $790 million, Volozh remains confident about the future. He frequently resides in Tel Aviv but calls himself "living on a plane," as he said, "Yandex was not my first company, and Nebius is not the end—every year we are starting a new company."