(Bloomberg) -- Nebius Group, the recently re-named Yandex NV that’s fresh off the sale of its Russian business, is planning a share buyback as the technology company rebuilds with an aim of becoming the largest commercial artificial intelligence infrastructure provider in Europe.
“We are a different company now,” Arkady Volozh, the Dutch-registered technology firm’s founder and chief, said in an interview from Amsterdam. “We hope that investors will want to go with us in the new direction, but those who don’t should be able to leave.”
Nebius’s planned share buyback will allow minority investors a choice to stay or exit the company, while redistributing a portion of the proceeds the company received from the sale of its Russian unit, he said.
The company finalized that sale this week, receiving shares and $2.8 billion in cash from a consortium of buyers. It now has $2.5 billion on hand after operational spending over the last few months after the first stage of deal was closed, a spokesman said. Nebius, whose ties with Russia were severed with the closing of the deal, plans to resume trading on the Nasdaq and aims to attract new investments, Volozh said.
Volozh started Yandex in 1997 and built it into Russia’s largest search engine, only to see the company come under intense pressure both in Russia and abroad following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He was placed under sanctions by the European Union that were only lifted earlier this year.
Nebius will also use the proceeds from the sale of its Russian business to develop four projects, with the key one focused on AI infrastructure, an idea that crystallized in 2023, according to Volozh.
The company already owns a data center in Finland, which hosts “the most powerful commercially available supercomputer in Europe,” according to a statement from the company on Tuesday. It plans to rent more computing capacity this year, and build several new data centers, mostly in the Nordic region, with hundreds of megawatts in capacity over the next one-and-a-half to two years, Volozh said.
While based in Europe, the company will be able to provide services globally, he said. The company sees the potential for annual revenue of multiple billion dollars, according to the statement.
Other projects include Avride, which is focused on developing autonomous driving technology for cars and delivery robots and is based in Austin, Texas; Toloka AI, aimed at aiding AI development from training to evaluation; and TripleTen, which works on education technology in the US and other markets and is concerned with re-training people for careers in tech, Nebius said in the statement.
Nebius plans to keep its hub in Tel Aviv, Israel, where Volozh has lived for years. That site will play a supporting role alongside the company’s locations in Amsterdam and Austin.
“The entire company will be built around the AI business model,” Volozh said. “We caught the wave, and we are going to ride this wave.”
--With assistance from Irina Reznik.
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