(Photo: Markus Pentikäinen)

How Nebius emerged from Russia and became one of Nvidia’s top-performing investments

The small Amsterdam-based AI data center startup rose from the ashes of a Russian tech giant.

6/16/25 4:25PM

Nvidia’s investment in AI cloud computing startup (and customer) CoreWeave is turning out to be quite a smart move for the company. CoreWeave’s shares have been on a tear since its IPO in March — almost 300%. Nvidia, whose GPUs fill CoreWeave’s data centers, stepped in to shore up that IPO and now owns about 7% of the company, a stake worth $3.7 billion.

The CoreWeave investment is Nvidia’s largest disclosed holding by far (excluding investments by NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm), but it isn’t the only data center business Nvidia’s invested in that’s showing big gains.

From the ashes of Yandex

The next best performer in Nvidia’s holdings is AI cloud computing company Nebius. Since the end of Q1, the value of Nvidia’s Nebius holdings has risen about 140%. While the $60 million stake is much, much smaller than Nvidia’s stake in CoreWeave, Nebius is not like other startups. The company has an interesting history that’s led it to become a rising competitor in building out AI computing infrastructure.

Nebius emerged from the Russian tech giant Yandex.

Founded in 1997, Yandex — which essentially became Russia’s Google, Uber, Spotify, and PayPal all rolled into one — made a splash back in 2011 with its $1.3 billion IPO, which at the time was the largest tech IPO since Google’s in 2004. Fast-forward to 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to the company’s stock being suspended from trading on Nasdaq due to EU sanctions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin Visits Yandex In Moscow — Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to Arkady Volozh while visiting Yandex on September 21, 2017 in Moscow, Russia (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

Nebius’ founder and CEO is Arkady Volozh. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the executive was also the cofounder and CEO of Yandex. Volozh found himself subject to EU sanctions after the war began, but they were lifted in March 2024 after Volozh moved hundreds of engineers out of Russia and publicly disavowed the Russian invasion, calling it “barbaric” but also saying, “Although I moved to Israel in 2014, I have to take my share of responsibility for the country’s actions.”

Last July, Yandex NV (based in Amsterdam) officially sold off its Russian holdings to a group of Russian investors for $5.4 billion (to continue operating as Yandex inside Russia), the largest corporate exit from Russia since the war began. The remaining business renamed itself Nebius Group. In October, the Nasdaq allowed trading of the rebranded company.

The company sought to rebuild itself around the four businesses in the Nebius Group holding company:

Nebius, the core business with a focus on AI cloud computing infrastructure, powered by “hundreds of thousands of GPUs”
AVRide, an autonomous vehicle and robotics company
Toloka AI, a data training company backed by Shopify CTO Mikhail Pakakhin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions
TripleTen, an educational technology company that helps people develop the skills to work in the technology sector

In an SEC filing this February, Nvidia disclosed its investment in Nebius, worth about $33 million by the end of Q4 2024, but is up 140% since Q1 2025. Like fellow Nvidia investee CoreWeave, the close relationship with the chip giant lets Nebius offer early access to the latest and greatest GPUs.

Sovereign AI

Nebius is looking to position itself to serve the growing market for sovereign AI, especially in Europe, which is seeing a flurry of AI infrastructure activity. Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Paris, where he highlighted Nebius as one of Nvidia’s partners building AI cloud infrastructure in Europe. Last week, Nebius also announced its entrance to the UK market and that it would be among the first to offer Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPUs in Europe.

In May, the Israel Innovation Authority announced that Nebius had been selected to build and run a “16,000 petaflop” national AI supercomputer for the country, utilizing 4,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. Volozh is an Israeli citizen, and moved to the country in 2014 after Russia first invaded Crimea. The supercomputer will be used to develop “national AI models” and for research.

Nebius currently has a market cap of $12 billion, and revenue for Q1 was up 385% year over year to $55.3 million, with adjusted net losses of $92.5 million. The company spent $544 million on capital expenditures in Q1 as it continues to invest in pricey GPUs for its AI data center business. Today, Nebius has data centers in Iceland, Finland, France, Missouri, and a new facility under construction in New Jersey.

In a Q1 2025 letter to investors, Volozh wrote:

“Delivering on our rapid growth plans will continue to require considerable investment. In this respect, we have been in a uniquely favorable position to fund our growth since we formally launched Nebius last July. We started with a significant amount of capital — $2.5 billion from our divestment — and raised an additional $700 million from top tier investors in December, giving us more than $3 billion in cash. This has enabled us to quickly build and scale our AI cloud business.”

It remains to be seen if Nebius will follow the same meteoric rise as CoreWeave. But the close partnership with Nvidia gives Nebius a similar advantage to get early access to Nvidia’s latest and most powerful GPUs.

Correction (June 17 2025): In an earlier version of this article, we said Nebius was Nvidia’s second-biggest investment when it is Nvidia’s second-fastest-growing investment.

Jon Keegan35m

OpenAI snags Amazon AWS deal for classified government work with Anthropic pushed aside

Following Anthropic being deemed a “supply chain risk” to national security, the field is clear for OpenAI. The Information is reporting that OpenAI just landed a deal with Amazon AWS to sell its AI services to government employees for both classified and unclassified work.

Previously, OpenAI was contractually obliged to use Microsoft Azure cloud hosting for the government contracts it handled as part of its $13 billion deal with the software giant, but since it restructured as a for-profit public benefit corporation and renegotiated the terms of the deal, OpenAI is free to use AWS, which is more commonly used in government work.

According to the report, contracts that sell AI services through another company like Amazon can be much larger then direct contracts with the government, which is crucial for OpenAI as it chases the success that Anthropic has had with enterprise customers.

OpenAI Clinches AWS Deal in Bid to Win Government Contracts

Rani Molla3h

Morgan Stanley thinks Tesla’s Terafab could cost an additional $35 billion to $45 billion in capex

Tesla’s Terafab project, which CEO Elon Musk said could launch this week, is poised to be one of the company’s most expensive bets yet. The facility is intended to manufacture the chips needed for Tesla’s autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, and to avoid supply bottlenecks.

If the company reaches its long-term goal of producing 100 million humanoid robots annually, it could require more than 200 million chips a year — over 50x its current demand, Morgan Stanley said.

The firm estimates total capital expenditure for the facility could reach $35 billion to $45 billion, including construction costs and roughly $20 billion to $25 billion for wafer fabrication equipment alone. That spending is not included in Tesla’s already sizable $20 billion capex budget for this year. Morgan Stanley’s semiconductor analysts described the effort as a “Herculean task,” noting the difficulty of building leading-edge chip capabilities from scratch.

While Tesla would likely spread the investment out over several years — even on an aggressive timeline, initial output would likely not arrive until the latter part of the decade — the effort would still weigh heavily on free cash flow and mark a shift toward a more capital-intensive business model.

Tesla’s most expensive factory to date, its Nevada battery plant that it began building in 2014, is estimated to have cost about $10 billion over time — a fraction of the expected Terafab cost.

Rani Molla

Nvidia pushes further into the autonomous vehicle space to compete with Tesla and Waymo

The tech giant is partnering with Uber and Lyft, sending their stocks higher.

CEO Jensen Huang Delivers Keynote Address During Nvidia's GTC Conference

Rani Molla21h

Lyft and Uber jump after announcing expanded robotaxi partnerships with Nvidia

Uber and Lyft both announced expanded AI and autonomous vehicle partnerships with Nvidia at the company’s GTC event, sending both ride-hailing stocks up after-hours on Monday and into Tuesday’s premarket session.

Uber is currently up more than 2%, while Lyft has risen around 1.3%.

Uber said Nvidia-powered Level 4 robotaxis will launch on its platform in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027, with plans to scale to 28 cities globally by 2028. Meanwhile, Lyft said it will use Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to improve ride-matching, mapping, and efficiency, while also using Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform as a foundation for future autonomous fleets.

Separately, Nvidia announced expanded autonomous driving partnerships with Kia and Hyundai.

The announcements highlight Nvidia’s growing push to provide the AI hardware and software powering next-generation robotaxi networks — packaging the technology needed for self-driving cars into a platform that other companies can use to compete with Tesla.

Rani Molla24h

Tesla’s Robotaxi program has disclosed its 15th accident, Electrek reports, citing the latest filing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to Electrek’s estimation, extrapolated from the last time Tesla disclosed mileage figures, that amounts to a crash every 57,000 miles — about 9x the rate for humans.

The latest crash involved a Model Y hitting a fixed object at 9 mph in January while the autonomous system was engaged.

Humans are very much still involved with Tesla’s so-called autonomous driving service. Despite the service announcing in January that it had started removing safety monitors from the front seats, only two unsupervised vehicles have been spotted in the last month, per Robotaxi Tracker. The entire fleet has also dwindled from around 50 vehicles to just 35. Their mileage is unavailable.