When Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich needed a name for their search software, they arrived at an unusually modest one: Yet Another Indexer. It sounds like something an engineer might mutter while opening a crowded folder. Shortened to Yandex, it became the name of a company whose reach eventually extended far beyond the search box. The joke survived a rather dramatic promotion.
Three decades later, Volozh was explaining another name, another business and another beginning. In July 2024, the Dutch parent of Yandex completed the sale of its Russian businesses. The international company would become Nebius. At 60, the co-founder associated with one of Russia’s familiar internet brands was returning to the daily work of building a business, this time supplying the machinery behind artificial intelligence.
There is a tempting version of this story in which an entrepreneur simply changes his mind. The actual sequence involved war, personal sanctions, resignation, a public condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a corporate separation that took years. What emerged carried experienced people and usable infrastructure into a new market. The interesting question is how much of a company can travel when its original world falls apart.
A mathematician finds something to search
Volozh was born in 1964 in Guryev, now Atyrau, in Kazakhstan. He attended a school specializing in physics and mathematics in Almaty, where Segalovich was also a pupil, before studying applied mathematics at Moscow’s Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas. He graduated in 1986. His route into entrepreneurship passed through CompTek, the technology business he co-founded, and Arkadia, which developed search software.
The early search projects had wonderfully specific reading lists: patents, Russian classical literature and the Bible. Before the task became finding anything on the internet, it was finding something in a body of text. That distinction matters. A search engine has to understand how a person’s question relates to words on a page. In Russian, changing word endings make a literal match a particularly unhelpful sort of pedantry.
Volozh and Segalovich’s work addressed those language problems. In 1993, Segalovich assembled the words that described their program and arrived at the abbreviation Yandex. Volozh suggested replacing its opening letters with the Cyrillic Я. Even the name managed to combine an engineer’s private joke with a decision about language. The ambition was already there; the solemn branding workshop appears to have been spared.
On September 23, 1997, Yandex-Web was introduced with an index of the Russian internet: about 5,000 sites and four gigabytes of text. Visitors took turns trying questions on a demonstration computer. Its search considered Russian word forms, the distance between words and the ranking of documents. Those are practical details, but they explain why the business began with a local advantage rather than a vague wish to conquer the web.
The Russian internet indexed for Yandex-Web’s September 1997 unveiling. Roughly 4 GB of text.
The company grows around the question
Yandex was registered as a separate company in 2000, with Volozh as chief executive. Search became the starting point for a wider set of services. Mail, news, shopping and other products gave people more reasons to return. Contextual advertising supplied a commercial logic: an advertisement could be useful because it appeared alongside something the user was already seeking.
The progression is easy to flatten into a list of products. Its human significance was that a person could spend more of an ordinary day inside software built by the same organization. Answering a query was the entrance. Keeping that person’s trust required many other jobs to go well, including jobs the user would never see: maintaining servers, moving data, making systems stay available.
Volozh also invested beyond Yandex. He backed Face.com, the Israeli face-tagging business acquired by Facebook in 2012, and served on its board. He was an early investor in the Turkish delivery company Getir. These were different consumer habits, different countries and different operating problems. They make his career broader than the shorthand of a founder attached forever to a single search engine.
His managerial habits could be less abstract than his mathematics. Former Yandex chief operating and financial officer Greg Abovsky recalled his hamburger analogy: leave people in one position too long and you risk overcooking them. Changing responsibilities could teach them another part of the business. Abovsky also remembered an executive who could be fierce about a button’s design and delighted by what a team achieved.
That combination suggests a particular kind of founder: willing to delegate responsibility, still capable of arriving at the level of a pixel. It can make the workplace demanding. It also helps explain why continuity of people would become so consequential later. Expertise in a large technology company lives in relationships and working habits as well as in code.
The break that a product launch could not fix
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the conditions under which Yandex operated. In June, the European Union sanctioned Volozh personally. Its allegations included Yandex’s role in promoting state narratives and suppressing critical material. He called the decision misguided and resigned as chief executive and executive director. Yandex itself was not included in those EU sanctions.
A successful technology business can accumulate a comforting vocabulary about solving problems. The events of 2022 exposed the limits of that vocabulary. Censorship, political responsibility and war could not be treated as another difficult release. The company’s position inside Russia, and the founder’s relationship to that position, became questions with consequences far outside an office.
Volozh publicly condemned the invasion in August 2023. He said he had been occupied with helping engineers leave Russia, explaining the delay in speaking. That was his account of the timing. His statement was unequivocal about the war. The European Union removed him from its sanctions list in March 2024. A few months later, the corporate separation reached its final closing.
“I am against the war.”
Arkady Volozh, August 2023
On July 15, 2024, the Dutch parent announced that it had fully disposed of its remaining interest in the Russian businesses. The transaction had been agreed at an approximately $5.4 billion valuation, subject to adjustments, with payment in cash and shares. Total cash proceeds were $2.8 billion. These distinctions matter: the transaction’s headline value was neither a personal payday for Volozh nor a pile of cash handed intact to the new venture.
After closing, the group reported $2.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents and no debt. It retained international businesses and infrastructure, including its Finnish data center. Yandex’s Russian operations continued separately. Nebius would have to earn its own customers. It began with resources that an ordinary new company would envy, alongside a history that an ordinary new company would never have to explain.
Start again, with the people who know the machines
The July 2024 launch described an organization built around more than a thousand engineers across the group. Its center of gravity would be an AI cloud: computing capacity and software for companies developing and running AI. Amsterdam was the headquarters, with operations spanning Europe, the United States and Israel. Volozh, who has lived in Israel since 2014, would lead it.
His interest in the opportunity was explicit. He described AI as a generational change comparable to the rise of the internet and search engines. The bottleneck, as he saw it, was infrastructure. A clever application still needs somewhere to run. The demand for computing makes physical questions unavoidable: where the chips sit, how they connect, how much electricity is available and how efficiently the software uses them.
At Nebius, the old experience of building infrastructure for a large internet business became a proposition to sell to others. The company’s own AI research could help its engineers understand what customers needed from the platform. In a 2025 conversation with Accel’s Matt Weigand, Volozh discussed beginning with a team, alongside the technology and capital required to build infrastructure. The people were part of the starting material.
This gives the restart an unusual shape. New businesses often gather a team around an initial product. Here, people with years of shared experience were being redirected toward a new commercial purpose. Their knowledge could travel even when a brand and most of its original operations could not. A corporate boundary had changed; the ability to build complicated things together was harder to put on a balance sheet.
The contracts get bigger. The work gets more physical.
In September 2025, Nebius announced an agreement to supply Microsoft with AI infrastructure from Vineland, New Jersey. The disclosed contract value was $17.4 billion through 2031, potentially rising to about $19.4 billion with additional services. These were commitments extending into the future, dependent on delivery. They were also a way to support financing for the capacity Nebius needed to construct.
The expansion continued in March 2026. NVIDIA announced a $2 billion investment in Nebius alongside a partnership covering infrastructure design and software. Five days later, Nebius announced a new Meta agreement: $12 billion of dedicated capacity over five years, with a further commitment to buy available capacity of up to $15 billion. The announced maximum was approximately $27 billion. Deliveries of the dedicated capacity were scheduled to begin in early 2027.
Five-year terms. Up to approximately $27bn combined contract value. These figures represent future commitments, not revenue already earned.
By September 2026, Palantir had named Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner, with an integration intended to give eligible customers control over their computing, data and models. In October, Nebius acquired Inferize to improve how its Token Factory inference platform brings additional GPU capacity into service. The announcement concerned the unglamorous problem of keeping expensive equipment useful when demand changes.
That is a fitting place to leave Volozh for now: back among specific problems. The first business helped people retrieve words from an expanding world of information. The current one sells the capacity behind a new way of processing it. Between them lies a rupture that neither experience nor money could make tidy. What connects the two is a mathematician’s recurring interest in what can be built when skilled people have a difficult enough job to do.