The curious case of Nebius, the publicly traded AI infrastructure 'startup' | TechCrunch

Nebius AI is a public company, but a startup in just about every sense of the word.

The company has been public for 13 years , floating in May 2011 as Yandex N.V. — the Dutch holding company of Russian internet giant.

Trading halted in February 2022 after Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 .

Nasdaq green-lighted Nebius to recommence trading last month ; it has since yo-yoed between $3.5 billion and $4.75 billion .

Nebius has found itself drawing lines between different entities it has left with and trying to make it all sense.

Nebius owns a self-driving company called Avride , based in Austin , Texas , and a Swiss AI and LLM company called Toloka.

Avride is the international division of Yandex , which spun out of a joint venture with Uber in 2020 .

Toloka is a platform that specializes in data labeling and quality control for large language models (LLMs).

Nebius plans to build more of its own data centers, both in Europe and the U.S. , but given the time it takes, it’s quicker to plug the gap with co-location facilities.

In addition to the Kansas location announced this week , Nebius had already unveiled a new GPU cluster in Paris that goes online this month .