Arkady the Billionaire Though best known for architecting the “Russian Google,” which was valued at $30 billion at its peak, Volozh has long maintained a politically apolitical persona in public. “I'm not at odds with the state,” he told WIRED in 2017. “I'm not at odds with the weather. What happens when it rains? We need to build a service to avoid the rain.”
Still, Volozh couldn't avoid the rain. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he was the target of EU sanctions and forced to step down from Yandex, the internet giant he built with the late Ilya Segalovich. Today, the tech billionaire announced he would return as CEO of a new European AI company: Nevius Group, which is technically a reincarnation of the Russian internet giant Yandex. Volozh and his team have been working on complex negotiations with the Kremlin for the past two years to sell off parts of its operations that are still based in Russia, including its search engine.
Yandex NV, the Dutch parent of the well-known Russian internet giant, was forced to accept a cut-price price of just $5 billion due to Russian rules against Western companies trying to exit Russia. But the deal allowed Volozh's team to salvage parts of Yandex that were already based abroad, including four AI-focused business units. These are assets that Volozh will turn into what he hopes will become the world's leading AI infrastructure company, which will also be rebranded.
“This life is different,” Voloj said of his new role as CEO of Nevius. “It feels great to be free and start something new.”
Sitting in his Amsterdam office on Monday, Voloj doesn't want to talk politics; he wants to focus on his new project. Nevius' main business will be the cloud division, and Voloj wants to give AI developers access to Big Tech-style infrastructure without the conflicts of interest with the U.S. giants that build their own models on the side. “We're building infrastructure for people who build models to build AI,” Voloj says of Nevius' plans.
Nevius has one data center in Finland and plans to triple its capacity this year, and is building others from the ground up with hundreds of megawatts of capacity, Voloj said, emphasizing that the company already has billions of dollars in capital raised and plans to raise more.
Until Nevius' new data centers are built (mostly in Europe), the company is renting space in dozens of existing data centers. [we] “It will exceed 100 megawatts,” he said. “We're increasingly understanding that the next major bottleneck is the infrastructure itself — data centers and energy. That's one of the key bottlenecks for the industry.”
The similarities between Yandex and Nevius go beyond Volozh's role as CEO. Of the 1,300 people currently working at the new company in Europe, “many” worked at Yandex in Russia, Volozh said. He also plans to replicate the same formula that made Yandex so successful. Nevius has divisions dedicated to autonomous driving, data labeling and education technology. “I hope that this AI cloud will help Nevius be more successful,” he said. [business] “Initially, this will be our main source of income and will give us the opportunity to grow other things,” Voloj explained.
