AI cloud firm Nebius predicts sharp growth as Nasdaq return nears

:AI infrastructure firm Nebius Group expects to make annual recurring revenue of $500 million to $1 billion in 2025, the company said on Friday before trading of its shares resumes on Nasdaq on Monday after a lengthy suspension.
Trading was suspended soon after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when the stock was traded under the ticker of Russian internet giant Yandex through its Amsterdam-based parent company. In July, Nebius emerged following a $5.4 billion deal to split Yandex’s Russian and international assets.
Yandex, Russia’s equivalent of Google, was valued at more than $30 billion before the war, but Nebius is now a fledgling European tech company focused on AI infrastructure, data labelling and self-driving technology.
A key unknown is what price the company’s shares will trade at after such a long trading hiatus and company transformation, especially as some investors have already written off the investment.
The 98-page document published on Friday, accompanied by a video presentation, is by far the most detailed insight the company has given since emerging from the split.
“We are at the very beginning of the AI revolution,” Nebius Chairman John Boynton said in a video presentation. “Nobody can be sure which business models or underlying technologies will prevail, but we can be sure of one thing: the demand for AI infrastructure will be massive and sustained.
“This is the market space where Nebius will play.”
CEO Arkady Volozh was bullish on the company’s prospects, pointing to his track record at building Yandex.
He said the industry was still in its “early days,” anticipating strong growth over the coming years and that compute, or computational power, is going to be key.
Nebius expects to have deployed more than 20,000 graphics processing units at its Finnish data centre by year-end.
Nebius’ estimated that its addressable market – GPU-as-a-service and AI cloud – will grow to more than $260 billion in 2023 from $33 billion in 2023.