As the stocks soars, Roman Chernin, co-founder and chief business officer of Nebius, discusses the company's latest multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft, and the strategy behind it.

San Francisco

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Rise of AI

Microsoft has finalized a $17.4 billion deal to rent GPU capacity, marking a significant move in response to the rapidly increasing demand for AI infrastructure. The agreement, involving a major data center in New Jersey, demonstrates the trend of large technology companies seeking external resources to support their AI initiatives, even when they have the capacity to build such infrastructure themselves.

The company providing the GPU capacity emphasized that its core business is to serve a diverse range of customers, from startups to enterprises, and that such large-scale deals are supplementary to its main operations. The recent fundraising efforts will be directed towards expanding its product offerings for a broad customer base. The company, originally spun out of Yandex and now listed on Nasdaq, attributes its growth and ability to secure major contracts to its delivery capabilities rather than its geographic or market listing.

$17.4 Bn Microsoft deal highlights surging AI infrastructure demand

First of all, it was not a surprise for us. So we always told to our shareholders, investors, that alongside we built our core business, which is actually the AI cloud to serve all types of startups and enterprises and enable them in all their tasks they do for adopting AI, we always planned and built to lend some of the largest deals, like with the super labs or with the hyperscalers. And so when we got our largest so far data center in New Jersey, we understood that that will be in the demand. And so this deal is just justified what we planned. I think part of what was really remarkable about this news is that Microsoft has decided to rent GPU capacity rather than expand its own data centers, because Microsoft had said before that these rental deals were actually their least preferred option. So what does it say about demand that they've actually decided to go ahead with a deal like this? Yeah, I think you answered it like in your question, right? So demand is just like very, very accelerating. So we see it across all types of the customers. We see it from the enterprises, we see it from the small and medium startups. And we obviously see it from the big tech companies like Microsoft. And so, like, I think that's just the justification that AI is growing. And if you, if we can deliver, then like our services will be in the demand, even from the people like Microsoft, who obviously can build themselves. It's all about compute power, and we saw that overnight with Oracle as well, the sizzle attached to that stock, thanks to these multi billion dollar contracts. And it can be a revolving door, just because when you step out into the foyer, and it's all blue sky, and it's, it's very exciting. We have these big contracts, you can step out the other side of the revolving door, and those big contracts evaporate. How concerned are you about exposure to a couple of major clients? Yeah, so it's a great question. And actually, again, like, it's important to understand about our business that our core business is to serve the vast variety of the customers. It's not about just lending one, two deals like that. It's on top of our core business. And the core business is to build flexible, full stack AI platform that can serve startups, enterprises, all types of the companies across the board that apply AI in different applications. And we already have thousands of customers. So this is our, like, main, main effort as a product company. And by the way, this, today's news about the additional fundraise that we completed, this money will go to actually serve and build for our, like, diversified customer base. So it will go to build the product. The other question I have is that you are pretty much a European company, you spun out of Yandex. We all know Yandex from the Russian market and got rid of those Russian assets in a separation. But the listing, the Nasdaq, why, why move stateside when you're such a European company to the core? I think, like, we just follow the market and we follow the demand. So like the Nasdaq listing is more or less technicality for me as a product person. But what is important is when we build the product is like we follow the customers. And obviously US is the, like, the most, like the fast growing market. To grow with the pace of AI innovations, you cannot be, cannot not to be there. So for instance, this Microsoft deal, would that not have been forthcoming if you were, say, listed in Europe? I don't think so. I think that it's not about, like, where the company is listed. It's about the capabilities of the company and the ability to deliver, right? So I think if you wouldn't be, like, if you wouldn't show before and now that we deliver on our promises, Microsoft would never choose to work with us.

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$17.4 Bn Microsoft deal highlights surging AI infrastructure demand

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