Yandex founder's $20 billion comeback

Hello! This week we look at the comeback of Arkady Volozh, the Yandex founder who has struck it rich—again—thanks to a mega deal for his new AI infrastructure startup.

From startup to sanctions and back again 

Last year, Arkady Volozh, one of the founders of Russia’s most valuable tech company, Yandex, was forced to give up the business and start again, almost from scratch. Now, just over 12 months later, his Nebius Group—reborn and redeveloped after a complex deal to divide up Yandex’s assets—has announced a $20 billion deal with Microsoft that has seen the company surge past Yandex in terms of its overall value.

Volozh co-founded Yandex—initially Russia’s answer to Google, but what became a sprawling internet conglomerate covering taxis, e-commerce and payments—back in the 1990s. He led the company through massive growth and expansion, before stepping back from operational management in 2014. Around 2019 he pretty much stopped visiting Russia, but remained on the Yandex payroll both through his shares and as CEO. Within three months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he was sanctioned by the EU and quit. The invasion and sanctions effectively killed Volozh’s long-term dream of using Yandex to build a major international tech business. In August 2023, he publicly condemned the war on Ukraine and in March 2024 had the sanctions against him lifted. A two-year saga of how to divide up Yandex’s assets and extricate Volozh from the Russian business wrapped up with him becoming CEO of Nebius Group, technically the rump holding company that previously owned Yandex. It retained the Netherlands-based headquarters and the rights to develop four Yandex business lines internationally.

The biggest of those became Nebius AI, based on Yandex’s cloud technology. In essence, it started by selling AI developers access to computing power from Yandex’s former data center in Finland, which Volozh inherited. It gave the firm a nice starting point, but to become a base for specialized services, the center had to be both greatly expanded and almost entirely reequipped, a source close to the company told The Bell.

“When this story began, the infrastructure market for AI was only just forming. Volozh was smart, because he could feel where it was moving ahead of time: he could see that there would be huge demand for computing power, and that it would keep growing,” said another of Volozh’s acquaintances. That meant the company had to expand, and fast.

That was no easy task. Volozh needed to renovate the Finnish data center and build new ones as quickly as he could. Each project required land, electricity, permits. Crucially, Nebius was among the first to acquire the leading Nvidia GPUs essential for AI infrastructure. All of that costs a lot of money.

Nebius got about $2.5 billion from selling off Yandex to the Russian buyers, part of which was used to buy back shares from those who held stakes in the former Yandex parent company, who had long been waiting for a payout. The rest was enough to fund the first round of expansion.

Nebius immediately sought new investment, both in the core business and in its subsidiaries. From late 2024 to June 2025, it attracted $1.7 billion—$700 million of which came from a consortium consisting of venture company Accel, which invests in tech firms, the Orbis international investment group, and Nvidia—a big win for a company that desperately needed early access to chips. It raised a further $1 billion through bonds.

The company quickly invested the money into construction projects: building data centers in Paris, Britain, Spain and Israel. It has tripled the capacity of its Finnish center and is building two more in the United States—in New Jersey and Kansas City—and plans for a third.

Mega deal