$700M infusion powers Nebius' full-stack AI ambitions

The news comes just weeks after resuming of Nasdaq trading, following a nearly three-year hiatus enforced by sanctions against Russian-affiliated entities.
$700M infusion powers Nebius' full-stack AI ambitions

AI infrastructure company Nebius has raised $700 million in private placement financing from Accel, NVIDIA, and certain accounts managed by Orbis Investments.

Just six weeks after getting back on the Nasdaq after a three-year break, Nebius is now raising money.‍

The funding supports Nebius’ previously announced plans to further build out its full-stack AI infrastructure – including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms and tools and services for developers – for AI pioneers globally.‍

Nebius’ core AI infrastructure business has around 400 engineers with decades of knowledge of building world-class tech infrastructure, as well as an in-house LLM R&D team.

The AI-native Nebius GPU cloud is designed to manage the full ML lifecycle – from data processing and training through to fine-tuning and inference – all in one place.

The recently launched Nebius AI Studio inference service expands the company’s offering to app builders, with access to a range of open-source models in a flexible, user-friendly environment at among the lowest price-per-token on the market.

The company combines investments in build-to-suit data centers at greenfield sites with additional capacity deployments through colocations and expanding its existing facilities.  

Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said:

“We have demonstrated the scale of our ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out across two continents. This strategic financing gives us additional firepower to do it faster and on a larger scale.”‍

In the private placement, Nebius will issue 33,333,334 Class A shares at a price per share of $21.00, implying a 3 per cent premium on the stock’s average price since trading resumed in October.‍‍

In addition, having considered the strong trading dynamics and liquidity profile in the Company’s shares since the resumption of trading on Nasdaq on October 21, 2024, the Board has determined that a potential repurchase by the Company of its Class A shares is no longer warranted.‍

At the Company’s Annual General Meeting of Shareholders in August 2024, shareholders approved a general authorization for the Company to repurchase up to 81 million Class A shares within certain parameters, including a maximum repurchase price of $10.50 per share.

This price represented the pro-rata amount of cash on the Company’s balance sheet following the final closing of the Company's divestment of its Russian business, net of tax and transaction costs, and was not an indication of the value of the current business.

According to John Boynton, Chairman of the Board of Nebius, the authorisation to potentially repurchase shares was originally intended to provide legacy shareholders who wanted to exit our new business an opportunity to do so. 

However, the company believes that those shareholders have had an opportunity to do so at a price higher than the maximum repurchase price authorized by shareholders.  ‍

“The Board has determined that the best way to maximise value for the Company’s shareholders is to invest our capital into our core AI infrastructure business, where the Company believes there is a substantial market opportunity.”

Nebius expects to deliver an ARR by year-end 2025 of $750 million to $1 billion.

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