The story of Arkady Volozh, 60, is unusual in many respects. No other Russian businessman found themselves trapped between the fronts of the Ukraine war to the degree he did. He spent many months on the EU sanctions list – even after breaking his long silence to voice his opposition to the Russian invasion.

Volozh developed the Russian search engine Yandex and became a billionaire as a result. The company was long a symbol for Russia’s ability to produce more than just crude oil and Kalashnikovs. Now, he has sold Yandex for a fraction of its value. He says he wants the freedom for a new beginning in the West. In his Amsterdam offices, he has gathered hundreds of tech experts that fled Russia. Volozh’s ambitions are vast: His company Nebius wants to build the infrastructure that Europe needs to catch up in the global artificial intelligence race.

In our interview at his improvised company headquarters, Volozh discusses his past and what he hopes for the future, what has gone wrong in Russia over the past decades and how Yandex became a propaganda channel. And his hopes for Europe.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Volozh, until this spring, you were the target of EU sanctions. Brussels was convinced that your company Yandex was spreading propaganda and that your tax payments were important for the Kremlin. But you weren’t particularly well-regarded in Russia either. How did it feel being caught between the two fronts?

Volozh: Nothing that I experienced over the last two years comes anywhere close to the suffering of Ukrainians every day. But in any event, I was happy when the sanctions were lifted. Now I'd like to just go ahead and build something new.

DER SPIEGEL: The attack on Ukraine began in February 2022. You spoke out against the war in Summer 2023. What took you so long?

Volozh: My position never changed. I still believe, the war should have never been started. It is a barbarity, and Ukraine is paying a terrible price for it. But also inside Russia, it marks the end of an era. The country had this nice opportunity to take a different path than in the past. We were all part of this building of a different, new and modern Russia.

DER SPIEGEL: In your anti-war statement published in August 2023, you said there were many reasons for your long silence. What were they?

Volozh: Many employees were trying to find an exit out of Russia and I did not want to endanger them. I had to wait until the situation had stabilized in a way. If I had been vocal from the beginning, we would be in a very different situation now. I’m not sure that we would be able to sit down here today.

DER SPIEGEL: After your statement, the Kremlin called you a traitor. Are you afraid? Are there still limits on what you can say?

Volozh: We parted with Russia. It’s over. Everybody stated their positions. I don’t want to look back. I want to look forward and start creating something new.

DER SPIEGEL: You are a rich man. Forbes magazine estimates your fortune at $1.5 billion. You could just take your money and enjoy your wealth.

Volozh: How boring that would be! It's far too exciting what's happening in our industry right now. Many experts believe that artificial intelligence could reach a level above human intelligence in just a few years. This is of epochal significance, like the development of the printing press. Should I just read articles about it and watch interviews on YouTube? I want to influence the direction in which this revolution develops.

DER SPIEGEL: Your new company is called "Nebius." Sounds a bit like some crazy professor.

Volozh: The first part of the name comes from "nebula,” Latin for cloud. And you're right, the second part is a crazy professor. It's a reference to the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, who once described the Möbius strip, a simple thing that becomes infinite, almost magical, with just a little twist. A fitting metaphor for what we are doing in the field of artificial intelligence.

DER SPIEGEL: What are you planning?

Volozh: We build computing power that is not tailored to or dependent on the large tech-corporations in China or the U.S. We have been able to gather more than 1,000 IT experts from Russia here. This includes the teams that once built the entire technical infrastructure for Yandex: the data centers, the interconnection servers and the racks that such a large company needs. We want to do something similar in Europe: We are building the computer infrastructure that AI developers need to train their models. Our goal is to become one of the world's largest independent providers in this field. And we aim to do that very quickly.

DER SPIEGEL: Would you explain us the business model behind it?

Volozh: We provide the infrastructure that other tech companies need for their development: We build the highways they use. We provide tools for other start-ups. Yandex was a B2C company, business to consumer. We are now T2T, technology providers for other technology drivers.

DER SPIEGEL: You can earn money with that?

Volozh: Oh yes! Most of the computing capacity that we install is already pre-booked and sold. We hope to become profitable in less than a year because the industry's demand for resources is huge: Whatever we install, the market buys immediately - and we really build a lot. Outside of the big U.S. tech companies, Nebius has one of the biggest teams working on AI cloud systems.

DER SPIEGEL: What fascinates you personally about it?

Volozh: We work with AI infrastructure, which gives us a front row seat to follow developments directly. You're right in the middle of it and understand what the others are doing because you think the same way.

DER SPIEGEL: You founded your new company in Amsterdam. Have you not yet written Europe off when it comes to AI?

Volozh: The tech industry is dominated by companies from the U.S. and China. That is unfair. There are so many opportunities to develop AI in Europe. The EU has huge potential. Unfortunately, it has so far been a blind spot on the tech map. There are successful AI companies in Europe, such as Aleph Alpha from Germany and Mistral from France. But there is a lack of large companies investing in AI infrastructure. This is important because compute – the computing power required – is one of the bottlenecks.

DER SPIEGEL: Does it bother you how slow Europe often is when it comes to innovation?

Volozh: Sometimes, when you fly back from Dubai or China, it can be tempting to think: Wouldn't it be easier to have a simple command system like this in those countries? The top makes a decision – and then all the hierarchical levels below nod everything through automatically. Liberal democracies, on the other hand, are sometimes so messy. The government changes, voters' attitudes change. But liberal democracies are more stable in the long term than less democratic systems. At some point you realize: The only chance to create something big and truly long lasting is precisely in such an environment. The story of my old company Yandex is an example of this.

DER SPIEGEL: How clean was the separation from the old Yandex to your new company?

Volozh: We completed our exit from Russia just days ago, the total and final corporate separation. There are no longer any links to our former company. We are now a Western company. And we are still listed on the U.S. technology exchange Nasdaq in New York.

DER SPIEGEL: Trading in Yandex shares there had been paused since the start of the war.

Volozh: I am confident that trading will resume and that our new company Nebius will be able to use the existing Nasdaq listing, which will give us a big business advantage.

DER SPIEGEL: This would turn your start-up into a listed company practically overnight. However, Yandex's Russian business was very profitable. You have not only cut your connection to Moscow, but also to your cash cow. Where will the money for your expansion come from now?

Volozh: AI is incredibly capital-intensive. After selling the Russian business, we have more than $2 billion in our accounts and no debt. That's enough to get started. We are also only one of very few companies in this field that are listed on the stock exchange. If institutional investors like big investment funds want to invest in AI quickly and with commitment, Nebius is the most obvious option.

DER SPIEGEL: The sale of Yandex dragged on for more than a year. How did you and the investors get your money, despite Russia's decoupling from the international financial market?

Volozh: The money was transferred in yuan via China. These resources now give us the means to start expanding the company. We are moving fast: building data centers nonstop and buying tens of thousands of GPUs …

DER SPIEGEL: … the high-performance processors needed to develop AI.

Volozh: Exactly. Fortunately, we have also kept control of an existing data center that is located in Finland. We are tripling its capacity. We are in the process of renting a lot of data centers across Europe and are planning to build a new facility in northern Europe. We have invested hundreds of millions of euros – and plan to invest even more.

DER SPIEGEL: So far, these extremely powerful GPUs have come almost exclusively from the U.S. company Nvidia. Are you able to obtain large quantities of them?

Volozh: We have a long-standing partnership with Nvidia. Yandex used to be the largest purchaser of their chips in Europe, and soon Nebius will become one of the largest buyers of Nvidia GPUs in the EU. We get the latest generations of processors with all the capacity we need. Nvidia has named us as a preferred partner.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you need more investors?

Volozh: Of course.

DER SPIEGEL: How do you convince investors that you and your people are not Russian agents? A lot of Russian is spoken in the corridors here.

Volozh: Right, we have a lot of Russian IT engineers – but we are proud of that. IT experts are a scarce resource and many companies are hunting for Russian specialists. Take a look at Microsoft or Google, where the number of Russians is in the tens of thousands. Deutsche Bank employed 3,000 programmers from Russia. The problem is not new. The majority of our management comes from the West, partly from the U.S., partly from Europe. Nebius' business language is not Russian, but the most widely spoken language in the world: broken English.

DER SPIEGEL: Are you suggesting that mistrust of Russians doesn't affect you? You yourself were sanctioned, and Italy cancelled visas for your employees en masse.

Volozh: It's wartime, I can understand that. In the first few months after the attack, nobody knew how to react. Later, Europe – especially the Netherlands – realized exactly what kind of people were leaving Russia. What an opportunity this is for Europe to accommodate such a stream of experts! The EU opened up our people got work visas.

DER SPIEGEL: Aren't you alarmed by the example of the Moscow-based anti-virus company Kaspersky? For a long time, this company was also very successful in the West, but now authorities in the U.S. and Europe have issued warnings against it. That's deadly for global business aspirations.

Volozh: Kaspersky has always remained in Russia. That's the difference. Europe should be smart enough to use the talent of all these people who have fled Russia. Of course, one can be afraid of everything and everyone! That's one approach. But it's not the smartest. Are there security concerns? OK, you can deal with those.

DER SPIEGEL: How do you ensure that you don't come under the influence of Russia?

Volozh: Our board and management are Western-dominated. We are as transparent as we can be, otherwise none of our business partners would talk to us. We have zero connection to Russia today. Not one byte of data flows from us to Moscow. We are having all of this certified by one of the four major consulting firms, and we expect the final report in the coming months. I realize that we have to be more pious than the Pope. Many of our engineers are the same as before, but the environment is completely different.

DER SPIEGEL: What sort of people have you actually brought together here?

Volozh: People who decided in February 2022 that they didn't want to be responsible for what has happened since then.

DER SPIEGEL: That was when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Volozh: These employees said: Not in our name – and not with our support. On the other hand, they are experts who know their value. Their skills are in demand all over the world. None of them need to worry about not finding a good job.

DER SPIEGEL: Many thousands of IT experts have travelled to countries such as Armenia and Uzbekistan. Now there are reports that many are returning to Russia because they have not been able to make it further to the West. Is the EU doing too little for these people?

Volozh: After the war began, many went to countries for which Russians do not need a visa. They sat there for two years and waited, some got Western visas, others did not. If I were Europe, I would do everything I could to integrate these experts.

DER SPIEGEL: You have mentioned the historic opportunity to create a different Russia. When was the moment you realized that the reactionary forces were too strong?

Volozh: Ask a frog in a kettle when exactly it got too hot. It's a gradual process. February 2022 was certainly a breaking point. For many decades, there were two competing forces in Russia, and they have always existed side by side. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was this strong momentum for change. We all had the feeling that we could create something new and better. The people who wanted to return to the past were not the majority back then.

DER SPIEGEL: Over the years, Yandex came increasingly under the influence of the Russian government. More and more media critical of the Kremlin disappeared from the news aggregator Yandex.News.

Volozh: In retrospect, many things can always be done differently, but I can no longer change anything. We followed a logic: Although we saw the good things fading, we believed that there was still a chance to turn this dynamic around. We had to make compromises and we always hoped: it would be temporary. But we couldn't change the general trend in the country. The more successful Yandex became, the more it was noticed by the state. I would say that we resisted as long as we could. But there was a point beyond which you cannot resist. Even great developments can be misappropriated. But should that mean one should not create great things from the beginning?

DER SPIEGEL: Are there any decisions that you regret?

Volozh: I regret we did not close Yandex.News after the new law was introduced in 2017 that banned aggregating all Russian language sources and allowed only those with a government approved license. We wanted to respond with transparency: We renamed the service into "Now in Russian Media.” I thought this would make clear that it was now one-sided, that it was not the "real" news. Today I realize that it didn't work. And although we had similar pages with local national news on all versions of Yandex in all countries, people kept thinking that what we were showing was a full aggregator from all over the world.

DER SPIEGEL: After the war began, the former head of Yandex.News accused your company of having become an accomplice to propaganda. Was he right?

Volozh: He was right. But after February 2022 we, those who have left the country, were no longer able to do much about it. There was no operational control of the company. And morally, we were not in position to advise people who stayed there under tremendous pressure and real risks to their fate. So, the only thing we could do was to start divesting the service as soon as possible. We sold Yandex.News right after the war started and we initiated the procedure of selling the Russian businesses.

DER SPIEGEL: You are now an emigrant. In a way, you are back where you started as a young man.

Volozh: Yes, but back then it was only a brief episode. Like most of my colleagues, I wanted to go to the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I had just arrived in Boston, opened a bank account and got my driver’s license. Then, in August 1991, I saw tanks rolling through Moscow on CNN.

DER SPIEGEL: An attempted coup by Soviet hardliners against the reformers.

Volozh: I took the next plane back. Fortunately, the coup had already failed by the time I landed. I thought at the time that I would contribute in my own way to building a new, modern country. So I stayed in Russia.

DER SPIEGEL: Most Russians remember the 1990s as a time of chaos, hardship and deprivation.

Volozh: They definitely were. It was not an easy time. But freedom is better than lack of freedom, isn't it? I saw the opportunities back then, a wonderful phase full of new possibilities. We were changing, business was changing, and we had the feeling that we were doing something historic. We wanted to create something that would benefit Russia and make it shine internationally. Switzerland is known for watches and chocolate, the French for wine and cheese. Our aim was to develop good technologies from the IT sector in Russia. It was to be our contribution to a better and more democratic Russia.

DER SPIEGEL: Isn't this naive in a society that has been defined for so long by a lack of freedom?

Volozh: But it is possible. Your own country is the best example. I have always been fascinated by the transformation of German society. A free and peaceful society emerged, in which prosperity and peace prevailed. Democracy is the system that respects its own people, the system of freedom. In healthy democracies, the economy also functions better.

DER SPIEGEL: You have Jewish roots, as did your now deceased friend Ilya Segalovich, with whom you once founded Yandex. As a talented student, how did you end up at a university for oil and gas, the Moscow Gubkin Institute?

Volozh: Our class consisted of 22 people at the time, and 17 of them were Jews who had been rejected by Russian elite universities. I actually wanted to go to the prestigious Moscow State University, the MGU. But that was in 1981, the height of Soviet anti-Semitism.

DER SPIEGEL: Where did that come from?

Volozh: After the Six Day War in 1967, many Russian Jews had gone to Israel, including scientists. And the reaction of the authorities was: Oh, those ungrateful Jews! Didn't the Soviet Union defeat the Nazis? And the Jews thanked us by taking our education and taking it abroad. It didn't matter that my grandfather fought in the Red Army in World War II and died in 1942, and that my father was a respected geologist who had discovered one of the largest oil fields in the Caspian Sea.

DER SPIEGEL: A lack of recognition for scientists also played a role in the founding of Yandex.

Volozh: My friend Ilya Segalovich could program! However, as a geologist, he earned the equivalent of maybe $5 a month in his job in the early 1990s. So I asked him to work for me. At first, he wasn't very impressed with the results: When the program was ready, he said: It's just another search engine. Or, when translated to English: Yet another index. So we named it Yandex.