Nebius Group to open first US cloud operations after resuming trading

By Stephen Nellis

Nov 19 (Reuters) - Nebius Group NBIS.O on Tuesday said it plans to open its first cloud computing operations in the United States, which could eventually house up to 35,000 chips from Nvidia NVDA.O.

Nebius was founded by Arkady Volozh, one of the original founders of Russian internet giant Yandex. Trading in Nasdaq-listed Yandex was suspended soon after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In July, Nebius emerged following a $5.4 billion deal to split Yandex's Russian and international assets. Volozh, who criticized the war, left Russia along with several hundred engineers.

Starting with a data center in Finland that was split from Yandex's assets, Volozh's business plan is to take the expertise developed managing infrastructure for a major internet company and apply it to building cloud computing services specifically for artificial intelligence, using chips from Nvidia NVDA.O.

The company on Tuesday said it will open its first U.S. cloud computing operations. The company is leasing data center space in Kansas City, Missouri, which will house Nvidia's H200 chips starting early next year, with newer Nvidia Blackwell chips arriving later in the year.

Nebius on Tuesday also said it has opened customer support hubs in San Francisco and Dallas, Texas, and will open another office in New York by the end of the year.

Last month, Nebius said it plans to make more than $387.6 million in capital expenditures in the fourth quarter, mostly in the form of buying chips.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)

((Stephen.Nellis@thomsonreuters.com;))