Nebius, a global AI infrastructure provider competing with hyperscalers, raised $700 million for expansion
Nebius NV, a publicly traded provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, announced that it has raised $700 million in funding through a private placement in which investors purchased approximately 33.3 million shares at $21 per share, representing a 3% premium to the company's volume-weighted average stock price. The round included contributions from Nvidia Corp., Accel, Orbis Investments and other backers.
Nebius is an Amsterdam-based company that originally functioned as the parent organization of Russian search engine Yandex. It went public on the Nasdaq in 2011 and was suspended from the stock exchange last year. Following a divestiture of its Russian holdings, the company now operates four businesses: three units that provide autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence models and technology for the education sector, and a fourth business that builds data centers, which is the focus of the $700 million investment announced today.
The company plans to use the capital to grow its data center capacity in the U.S. and other markets, with the new infrastructure optimized to host AI training and inference workloads. Nebius recently announced plans to triple the capacity of an existing data center in Finland to 75 megawatts, an upgrade that will enable the company to deploy up to 60,000 additional graphics processing units in the facility. The hardware rollout will include an unspecified number of H200 chips, an upgraded version of Nvidia Corp.'s H100 graphics card that features a faster, higher-capacity memory pool allowing AI models to process data faster.
Nebius' Finland facility employs free cooling, a method that uses cool air from outside the data center to chill water that serves as a coolant for the hardware inside, and the company has built a system that repurposes some server heat to warm local homes. The company has also disclosed plans to open three additional facilities, with one to be built in North America and the other two located in Europe, having already signed letters of intent for the latter projects. Beyond building custom data centers, Nebius also deploys AI hardware in co-location facilities operated by partners.
In addition to its data center infrastructure, Nebius offers a recently launched service called AI Studio, which provides access to hosted versions of popular open-source models such as the Llama 3.1 large language model series, allowing customers to process up to 10 million tokens' worth of data per minute. The company plans to add support for models that can generate images and videos. In conjunction with today's funding announcement, Nebius upgraded its 2025 revenue forecast to between $750 million and $1 billion, up from the previous guidance of $500 million to $1 billion.