Who Is Arkady Volozh? Nebius CEO and Yandex Co-Founder

Arkady Volozh is the founder and chief executive of Nebius Group, the AI cloud company that grew out of Yandex, the search company he co-founded and ran until 2022. Nebius, which builds data centers full of AI chips and rents that computing power to developers, appointed him CEO in August 2024.

Under Volozh, Nebius signed or closed five financing deals worth about $16.4 billion in the first ten months of 2026, according to its own SEC filings. Both of its convertible-bond sales closed larger than first announced, by about 16% and 28%. Debt made up close to nine dollars in ten of that total. On top of those deals, Nebius sold shares into the market in May and June.

Arkady Volozh at a Glance

What Does Arkady Volozh Do at Nebius?

Arkady Volozh runs Nebius Group as its chief executive and sits on its board as an executive director. Nebius's annual report for 2025 calls him the principal founder and says he was "appointed as executive director and CEO of Nebius Group in August 2024".

He doesn't run it alone. The same report names a management committee of the chief executive and the chief operating officer, Ophir Nave, as the body that manages the business and decides where its resources go.

What Volozh oversees is an AI cloud. Nebius fills data centers with GPUs, the chips that train and run AI models, and sells time on them to companies building AI. Microsoft and Meta are among its customers. Its shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS. If you want the trader's side of that business, Phemex has a guide to Nebius's AI cloud business and trading risk.

The annual report said Volozh beneficially held about 52% of the voting control at the end of March 2026. That made Nebius a "Controlled Company" under Nasdaq's rules, free to skip some requirements on independent directors.

Shareholders renewed his board seat at Nebius's annual general meeting in August 2026. About 95% of the votes cast for or against backed Volozh, according to the company's announcement of the meeting's results.

How Did Arkady Volozh Build Yandex?

Volozh built Yandex on search, and he ran it as chief executive and executive director from 2000 to 2022, Nebius's board page says. Volozh had come from CompTek International, where he was also CEO.

The holding company behind Yandex, Yandex N.V., was set up in the Netherlands in 2004 and listed its shares on Nasdaq as YNDX. It's the same legal company that took the Nebius Group name in 2024. Nebius's annual report names John Boynton, a founding shareholder of Yandex, as its chairman since 2016 and a director since 2000. So a Yandex veteran chairs the board Volozh answers to at Nebius.

In a June 2022 release, Yandex N.V. dated its search products to 1997 and named e-commerce, online entertainment and cloud computing among the markets it had moved into. It called itself "one of Europe's largest internet businesses" and described its products as "powered by machine learning".

Machine learning links Yandex to Nebius, and so do the people. Roman Chernin, a Nebius co-founder and its chief business officer, spent more than a decade at Yandex leading search and later maps. Nebius's annual report adds that co-founder Andrey Korolenko ran infrastructure at Yandex.

The hard part of an AI cloud is building and running very large computing systems, and Volozh's team had done that work at Yandex for years.

Arkady Volozh's Career, From CompTek to Nebius

Nebius's board page says Volozh's background in computer science led him to several IT businesses, among them InfiNet Wireless and CompTek International. He holds a degree in applied mathematics from the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas.

He also backed other founders. Volozh sat on the board of Face.com, a face-tagging startup that Facebook bought in 2012, and he was an early investor in the grocery delivery company Getir. The annual report adds a board seat at Neurosteer, a US company that makes a wearable device for reading brain activity.

In June 2022, Yandex N.V. said Volozh had "stepped down with immediate effect" as its executive director and chief executive. The same release said "The European Union has imposed sanctions on Mr. Volozh personally."

In March 2024, the Council of the European Union deleted Volozh's entry from its sanctions list through Implementing Regulation 2024/849.

Nebius Group launched in July 2024, and its launch release described the company as "Founded and led by visionary tech entrepreneur Arkady Volozh". In the same release, Volozh called the work of closing the gap in AI infrastructure "something foundational, like the railways in the industrial revolution." He also argued that "Europe's challenge in the global AI race is competing for talent."

The new group started with more than a thousand AI engineers, by its own count, and its headquarters in Amsterdam. Volozh called those engineers "one of our greatest assets" and said they had spent years building infrastructure together in big tech. A month later he was back in the chief executive's office, this time at Nebius.

How Much Has Nebius Raised in 2026?

Nebius's SEC filings to early November show about $19.2 billion of new financing for 2026. Five deals from March to October account for about $16.4 billion.

The rest came from share sales in May and June through an at-the-market program, which sells stock into the market a little at a time. Those sales brought in about $2.8 billion after costs, its second-quarter accounts show.

A convertible note is a bond its holders can swap for shares later. Nebius enlarged both sales when it set their price, and the first buyers then took up options to buy more.

The July loan was Nebius's first secured debt, backed by GPUs already serving an investment-grade customer. Citi's $3.5 billion is a one-year bridge loan, short-term money that tides a company over to longer-term funding. "Sequencing our financing is how we optimize our long-term cost of capital," chief operating officer Ophir Nave said in the Citi announcement.

Nebius also says it can borrow against more than $40 billion of long-term contracts with investment-grade customers. Debt deals make up most of the $19.2 billion, and Nebius expects those contracts to back more of its financing.

That tally covers every Form 6-K Nebius filed from January to early November 2026. Its third-quarter results are due in mid-November, before the US market opens. If you trade NBIS, earnings days are one of the stock risks covered in what traders should know before trading TradFi futures.

Can You Trade Nebius on Phemex?

Yes, through NBIS/USDT, a perpetual futures contract that tracks Nebius's Nasdaq-listed shares and settles in USDT. A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry date, and NBIS/USDT is one of Phemex's TradFi futures on stocks.

One contract equals one NBIS share, but you never own the share itself, so you get no vote and no dividend. You can go long or short. Futures use leverage, and a leveraged position is closed automatically if losses push its margin below a set minimum, the job of a liquidation engine. Funding, a payment between long and short holders, changes hands every 8 hours.

Nasdaq trades on weekdays while the perpetual keeps trading through weekends, so NBIS/USDT can move at times when you couldn't trade the stock itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Arkady Volozh still under EU sanctions?

No, Volozh is off the EU list that named him. A Council regulation deleted his entry in March 2024, and the list's consolidated text as amended in October 2026 doesn't carry his name. Yandex N.V. had said in June 2022 that the EU imposed sanctions on him personally.

When did Arkady Volozh become CEO of Nebius?

In August 2024, according to Nebius's annual report. Volozh had run the same company as Yandex's chief executive from 2000 to 2022, and shareholders renewed his seat as an executive director in August 2026.

What did Arkady Volozh study?

Applied mathematics. Nebius says Volozh holds a degree in the subject from the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, and it credits his computer science background with leading him into IT businesses.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.