Formerly known as Yandex, the company focused on cloud infrastructure for artificial intelligence use cases, aka "AI compute," is to begin trading on public markets once again — more than two years after Nasdaq suspended trading due to economic sanctions imposed in response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The Dutch company seeks to become one of the major players in Europe in this increasingly growing "GPU-as-a-service" space; it sits in a relatively unique position-it is still very much a startup in almost every which way as it takes on a new life as a new business, but as a public company, that means people can invest in it as an alternative to the hyperscalers that are Alphabet or Microsoft.

Founded in 1997, most people know Yandex as the "Google of Russia," building everything from search engines and advertising products to maps and autonomous vehicles. Yandex's core market was very much its domestic Russia plus a handful of neighboring countries, however its parent was a Dutch holding organisation called Yandex N.V. which went public on the Nasdaq in 2011, followed by a secondary listing three years later on the Moscow Exchange.

Yandex N.V. had been doing really well as a listed company, having reached a valuation of $31 billion at the end of 2021 before the Russia-Ukraine conflict kick-started a series of global sanctions against companies in the region and against individuals. After coming under the sanctions list of the European Union, the co-founder and CEO of Yandex Arkady Volozh had no choice but to step down, but was finally removed from the list in March 2024, thereby clearing his return as a CEO of the new version of Yandex N.V.

The next rendition is Nebius, whose business is based on one of Yandex N.V.'s few remaining assets outside of Russia: a Finnish data center and AI cloud business called Nebius AI. The new entity formally emerged back in July outlining its plans as a "European AI compute leader," like something akin to CoreWeave, which is also expanding into Europe, raising a ton of equity and debt en-route.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq at the start of 2022 declared it was delisting Yandex, along with several other companies affiliated with Russia. The internet company lodged an appeal and Nasdaq agreed to keep its listing - but kept the halt on trading while it went about the process of divorcing its Russian ties. With those ties ended earlier this year, and $2 billion in the bank from selling its Russian assets, Volozh at the time said he planned to continue Nebius as a public company - as it was an easier and cheaper way to access capital, in what is a very capital-intensive business.

"Our ambition is to build one of the world's largest specialist AI infrastructure businesses," Volozh said in a statement. "This requires access to technological expertise, graphics processing units, and capital. These are exactly what we have."