AI infrastructure provider Nebius secured USD 700 million through a private placement of 33.3 million shares at USD 21 each. The round saw participation from NVIDIA, Accel, and Orbis Investments, among other undisclosed investors.

Funds were earmarked to expand Nebius' data center capacity in the US and other markets. The company plans to triple the capacity of its Finland facility to 75 MW and open three additional facilities: One in North America and two in Europe. As part of the deal, Accel partner Matt Weigand will join Nebius' board as an observer after a formal election at the 2025 shareholder meeting.

The company recently launched an AI Studio service that provides access to hosted versions of open-source models capable of processing up to 10 million tokens per minute. Following the funding, Nebius upgraded its 2025 revenue forecast between USD 750 million and USD 1 billion.

Netherlands-based Nebius, originally Yandex's parent company, offers data centers to power GenAI and other ML workloads. Beyond cloud infrastructure, it operates Avride (autonomous vehicles; Texas), Toloka (AI/LLM; Netherlands), and TripleTen (EdTech; Wyoming).

Analyst QuickTake: While the funding round is significant, the company is competing against well-funded players in the space, such as CoreWeave (raised a total of USD 13.4 billion) and SambaNova (raised USD 1.1 billion). While CoreWeave expands its data center operations from the US to Europe, Nebius is moving to the US, with plans for a new GPU cluster at a co-location in Kansas City. Nebius has also increased its annualized run rate (ARR) to USD 750 million to USD 1 billion by the end of 2025 in light of the funding.