Nebius, an AI firm formed as a result of a spinoff of Russian IT giant Yandex' international business, has announced the launch of a new GPU cluster in Paris. The move comes as part of the company's plans to invest more than $1bn by mid-2025 in AI infrastructure in Europe.

“We work in a new industry which requires both deep technology and significant capital," Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said in a statement shared with bne IntelliNews.

"Our data centre in Finland already provides the latest high- performance compute, tools and services to AI developers around the world. The addition of our new GPU cluster in Paris is the next step in our plan to expand Europe’s AI capacity as we develop Nebius into a leading global AI infrastructure company,” he added.

Nebius is launching a new GPU cluster in Paris, becoming one of the first in Europe to offer NVIDIA’s H200 Tensor Core GPUs. As an NVIDIA cloud and OEM partner, Nebius will also be among the first to provide customers with the cutting-edge Blackwell platform in 2025. Already a leading GPU capacity provider in Europe, particularly through its energy-efficient data centre in Mäntsälä, Finland, Nebius is expanding its AI infrastructure through investments in new greenfield data centres and increased capacity at existing locations.

The company has signed agreements to construct two new data centres in Europe and is already working on expanding its Finnish facility. These initiatives, which include roughly $200mn in investments since early this year, will enable Nebius to support tens of thousands of GPUs, enhancing its AI cloud services globally. Built to meet the growing demands of the AI industry, Nebius draws on deep technical expertise in hardware, software, and machine learning. Its team of over 500 engineers brings decades of experience in building top-tier tech infrastructure, supported by an in-house LLM R&D team.

Earlier this year, the split of Yandex, often referred to as the "Russian Google, was completed, and the Russian tech behemoth's former international business was renamed Nebius Group, which consists of four firms: Nebius AI, Toloka AI, TripleTen, and Avride.

In July 2024, a group of Russian buyers completed a $5.4bn deal involving cash and shares to acquire Yandex's Russian operations. This marked the largest corporate exit since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, though the transaction was made at a significant discount.

At that time, Nebius Group had a valuation of $2.11bn according to back of the envelope estimate conducted by analysts at Seeking Alpha.

Nebius AI is focused on building full-stack infrastructure to service the explosive growth of the global AI industry, including large-scale GPU clusters, cloud platforms, and tools and services for developers. Headquartered in Amsterdam and listed on Nasdaq, the company has a global footprint with R&D hubs across Europe, North America and Israel.

Nebius’s core business is an AI-centric cloud platform built for intensive AI workloads. With proprietary cloud software architecture and hardware designed in-house (including servers, racks and data centre design), Nebius gives AI builders the compute, storage, managed services and tools they need to build, tune and run their models.

An NVIDIA preferred cloud service provider, Nebius offers high-end infrastructure optimized for AI training and inference. The company boasts a team of over 500 skilled engineers, delivering a true hyperscale cloud experience tailored for AI builders.