More than two years after Nebius, formerly known as Yandex and now focused on cloud infrastructure for the use of AI (also known as “AI computing”), was suspended from trading by the Nasdaq due to economic sanctions, The company plans to start trading on the open market again. In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Netherlands-based company is in a somewhat unique position as it races to become one of Europe's major players in the fast-growing “GPU as a Service” space. Although it's a new business, being a publicly traded company means anyone can invest in it as an alternative to the usual US hyperscalers like Alphabet and Microsoft.
Founded in 1997, Yandex is known by many as the “Google of Russia”, building everything from search engines and advertising products to maps and self-driving cars. Yandex's core market has been mostly within Russia and some neighboring countries, but its parent company is a Dutch holding company called Yandex NV, which listed on the Nasdaq in 2011 and moved to the Moscow Exchange three years later. Next listed.
Yandex NV had been doing well as a publicly traded company, with a valuation of $31 billion at the end of 2021, before the Russia-Ukraine conflict triggered a wave of global sanctions against companies and individuals in the region. Arkady Volozh, co-founder and CEO of Yandex, was forced to resign after the European Union added him to its sanctions list, but he will be removed from the list in March 2024 and Yandex NV The path has been opened for him to return as the CEO of the next version of .
The next version is Nebius, whose business is based on a Finnish data center and AI cloud business called Nebius AI, which is one of Yandex NV's few remaining assets outside Russia. The new organization was officially launched in July and outlined plans to become “Europe's AI computing leader” like CoreWeave. CoreWeave is also expanding into Europe and is in the process of raising significant equity and debt. root.
Nasdaq had announced that it would delist Yandex and several other Russia-related companies in 2022, but Yandex has appealed and Nasdaq will remain listed, but trading will be suspended due to severing ties with Russia. agreed to continue. Those relationships were dissolved earlier this year, with the sale of Russian assets netting the bank $2 billion, but at the time Mr. Volosh decided to invest in Nevius as a public company because it was an easier and cheaper way to access capital. He said he plans to continue. It's a very capital intensive business.
“Our goal is to build the world's largest professional AI infrastructure business,” Volozh said in a statement. “This requires technical expertise, graphics processing equipment and access to capital, which are exactly what we have.”
Nevius announced that its Class A common stock will resume trading on Monday, October 21, 2024.