Palantir and Yandex’s Former Parent Company Nebius Enter Strategic Partnership

U.S. company Palantir has announced a strategic partnership with Nebius Group N.V., formerly known as Yandex N.V., the parent company of the Russian Yandex group until 2024.

Nebius Group N.V. announced the partnership in a press release.

According to the company, the partnership will give Palantir’s commercial customers access to Nebius’ AI-optimized computing infrastructure and cloud platform.

As part of the partnership, Palantir has named Nebius its preferred infrastructure partner for sovereign AI. Once the integration is complete, Nebius’ computing resources and inference endpoints will be hosted within Palantir’s corporate perimeter.

The companies will also work together to accelerate the deployment of new computing capacity to serve Palantir customers.

“Nebius’ compute infrastructure powers your ability to run your own AI models under conditions you control. Our ontology and their infrastructure will undergird the sovereignty our partners are demanding.” Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, said.

Nebius Group N.V.

Nebius is a Dutch technology company headquartered in Amsterdam that specializes in cloud infrastructure and computing capacity for artificial intelligence. It is the direct corporate successor to Yandex N.V., the former Dutch parent company of the Russian Yandex group.

In July 2024, Yandex N.V. completed the sale of all its Russian assets to a consortium of local investors. The deal was valued at approximately $5.4 billion. After the transaction, the Dutch company fully divested its stake in the Russian business and changed its name to Nebius Group.

Nebius retained the former group’s international technology assets: the Nebius AI cloud platform, data-preparation solutions developer Toloka AI, autonomous transportation company Avride and education platform TripleTen. It also acquired a data center in Finland, some of Yandex N.V.’s former technology assets and about 1,300 employees.

Nebius is headed by Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh, who led Yandex N.V. from 2000 to 2022, while Chairman of the Board John Boynton was one of Yandex’s early shareholders.

In June 2022, the European Union imposed personal sanctions on Volozh over Yandex’s role in promoting Russian state media, limiting the visibility of Kremlin-critical material and contributing to Russia’s budget. In March 2024, the EU removed Volozh from its sanctions list after he condemned Russia’s invasion and began withdrawing from the Russian business.

Ukraine also imposed sanctions on Volozh in October 2022. At the same time, Nebius Group itself is not subject to restrictions imposed by Ukraine, the EU, the United States or the United Kingdom.

It was previously reported that in early September, former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced the creation of his own defense company, with Palantir set to be one of its investors.