A new ticker, NBIS, a truncation of Nebius, is a new company in the AI cloud infrastructure marketplace. This company will be accessible for Nasdaq trading on October 21.
Since there had been little of the typical pomp that attends most startups' trip to IPO—no roadshows, no horn tootin', no confetti-laden ceremonies—casual fans could be forgiven for thinking where this firm had come from. This is because Nebius is a unique entity: a publicly traded company that is, in every way, a startup.
Yandex N.V. Restructures into Nebius
The Dutch parent organization of the Russian internet powerhouse Yandex Nebius went public 13 years ago, in May 2011, under the name Yandex N.V. By the end of 2021, Yandex N.V. had a historical worth of $31 billion, but everything transformed in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
Due to boundaries placed on businesses with ties to Russia, Nasdaq banned trading in Yandex N.V. contributes in February of that year. A year later, Nasdaq stated it would delist Yandex immediately. However, Yandex could successfully argue on the grounds that it was transformation, a process that would take an extra 16 months to conclude.
One reason for this was offloading all of its Russian assets, which carried most of the company's true value. What was still owned by Yandex N.V. was an accidental collection of business divisions and technology that happened to be situated outside of Russia. In July, Yandex N.V. changed its name to Nebius AI, an AI cloud software with its own data center in Finland, marking the end of this disposal.
Nebius Launches AI Cloud Platform
Arkady Volozh (above), a former CEO and co-founder of Russian Yandex who was removed from a European restriction list in March for openly rejecting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, was in charge of the new company.
Nebius's primary business is selling GPUs "as-a-service" for companies that need "compute"—the processing speed and assets required to achieve computational goals like implementing machine learning models and working algorithms. Last month, the company introduced a comprehensive cloud computing tool for the "full machine learning lifecycle," which involves data instruction, fine-tuning, and inference.
Nebius Faces Volatility, Shows Stabilization
Nebius has made a quit return to the public eye after a month. It is much below its $18 billion market capitalization before trading ended in February 2022, which was to be expected, and it has since shifted between $3.5 billion and $4.75 billion, with some signs that it has started to level out.
In an interview with TechCrunch this month in London, Volozh said, "We had no idea what would happen. It could be $5 per share, or it could be $50 per share. This has never occurred before, and nobody really knows how to manage it." The good news is that it has remained above the cost of the assets. This shows that the market thinks we will be stable even though it is still unstable.