Nebius Wins Israeli AI Supercomputer Project, Marking Big Step After Yandex Split

Posted by By Dan Taylor 3 Min Read

Nebius, a young AI company with a complex backstory, has been chosen to build Israel’s national AI supercomputer. The announcement comes as a surprise to many, given the company’s modest size and relatively recent formation.

While Nebius is officially headquartered in Amsterdam and trades on Nasdaq with an $8.3 billion valuation, its roots lie in Yandex—the former Russian tech giant once known as “Russia’s Google.”

From Yandex Legacy To Global Ambition

Nebius was created from the non-Russian parts of Yandex following a political and corporate split. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Yandex faced sanctions and was suspended from trading on Nasdaq. Co-founder Arkady Volozh, who had moved to Israel before the pandemic, publicly condemned the invasion. In response, the Kremlin pushed to take over Yandex.

A deal was reached at the end of 2024. Kremlin-linked investors bought the Russian operations for $2.4 billion, while Volozh kept the international cloud and AI divisions under a new name—Nebius.

Volozh, now CEO of Nebius, promised to invest $1 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure. Since then, Nebius has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building data centers in Finland, France, and the U.S.

A Strategic Win For Nebius

Winning the Israeli supercomputing contract is the company’s first major public deal. It reflects growing confidence in Nebius’s capabilities, even though the company reported less than $200 million in revenue last year and is not yet profitable.

Before its return to Nasdaq, Nebius raised $700 million in a private funding round led by Nvidia. Last week, Jeff Bezos invested in Toloka, Nebius’s AI subsidiary.

Political Distance And Technical Credibility

Though he made his fortune in Russia, Volozh has distanced himself from the Kremlin. Alongside the late Ilya Segalovich, he helped build Yandex into a $30 billion tech empire. But tensions with the Russian government increased over control of user data and news content, especially involving services like Yango, which still operates in Israel.

Now, Nebius is trying to redefine itself as a neutral, innovation-focused firm based in Europe and led by Israeli citizens.

The Israel Innovation Authority’s decision to choose Nebius signals that the country is ready to bet on that new identity.

Dan Taylor
View More Posts
Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor