Accel

BONUS: Nebius’s Arkady Volozh | On Building in the Agentic Era | Spotlight On | AccelVC

In this episode of Spotlight On, Arkady Volozh of Nebius outlines the company’s rapid expansion in AI infrastructure, highlighted by massive contracts with Meta and Microsoft, a deepening engineering partnership with Nvidia, and a multi‑billion‑dollar financing strategy. Volozh explains how Nebius leverages these deals not merely for cash but to secure long‑term capacity commitments that fund the construction of gigawatt‑scale data centers. Key insights include a $27 billion Meta agreement split into $12 billion for bare‑metal capacity and $15 billion for value‑added services, and a similar $17 billion Microsoft contract. These contracts act as bankable assets, allowing Nebius to raise cheap capital for its own cloud platform. The firm’s full‑stack approach—owning land, power, racks, and software layers—aims to eliminate third‑party margins and deliver cost‑effective, high‑performance AI compute. Volozh emphasizes the technical depth of Nebius’s team, citing two decades of large‑scale ML infrastructure experience and a long‑standing relationship with Nvidia that goes beyond equity to joint hardware and software optimization. The company now operates a network of owned and colocated sites ranging from 10 MW to multi‑gigawatt facilities, targeting AI‑native startups and enterprises that need integrated tooling rather than just raw GPUs. The implications are significant: Nebius positions itself as a vertically integrated alternative to traditional hyperscalers, offering scalable, efficient AI cloud services while using hyperscaler contracts to fund its growth. This model could reshape AI infrastructure financing and provide a more tailored platform for the burgeoning AI startup ecosystem.