AI data center builder Nebius raises $700M in funding
CoNebius NV, a publicly traded provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, today announced that it has raised $700 million in funding.
The company received the capital through a private placement that saw investors buy about 33.3 million shares for $21 apiece. That represents a 3% premium to Nebius’ volume-weighted average stock price. The round included contributions from Nvidia Corp., Accel, Orbis Investments and other backers.
Nebius is an Amsterdam-based company that originally functioned as the parent organization of Russian search engine Yandex. It went public on the Nasdaq in 2011 and was suspended from the stock exchange last year. A few weeks ago, the company’s shares resumed trading after it offloaded its holdings in Russia.
Following the divestiture, Nebius was reportedly left with four businesses. Three of the units provide autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence models and technology for the education sector. The fourth business, which builds data centers, is the focus of the $700 million investment announced today.
Nebius said that it will use the capital to grow its data center capacity in the U.S. and other markets. According to the company, the new infrastructure will be optimized to host AI training and inference workloads.
Nebius recently announced plans to triple the capacity of an existing data center in Finland to 75 megawatts. One megawatt corresponds to the power consumption of several hundred households. According to the company, the upgrade will enable it to deploy up to 60,000 additional graphics processing units in the facility.
The hardware rollout will include an unspecified number of H200 chips. The H200 is an upgraded version of Nvidia Corp.’s bestselling H100 graphics card that includes a faster, higher-capacity memory pool. The upgraded RAM allows AI models to process data faster.
Nebius’ Finland facility dissipates the heat generated by its servers with a method known as free cooling. It involves using cool air from outside a data center to chill water, which in turn functions as a coolant for the hardware inside. Nebius also built a system that repurposes some server heat to warm local homes.
When it detailed the data center upgrade earlier this year, the company also disclosed plans to open three additional facilities. One will be built in North America while the other two are set to be located in Europe. Nebius says that it has already signed letters of intent for the latter projects.
Besides building custom data centers, the company also deploys AI hardware in co-location facilities operated by partners. A co-location facility is a data center that hosts infrastructure for multiple organizations.
Nebius offers infrastructure alongside a recently launched service called the AI Studio. It provides access to hosted versions of popular open-source models such as the Llama 3.1 large language model series. According to Nebius, customers can process up to 10 million tokens’ worth of data per minute.
AI Studio is also a focus of the company’s product development efforts. Nebius says that it plans to add support for models that can generate images and videos.
In conjunction with today’s funding announcement, the company upgraded its 2025 revenue forecast to between $750 million and $1 billion. That’s up from $500 million to $1 billion before.
Photo: Unsplash
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.
One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.
Join our community on YouTube
Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.
THANK YOU