Microsoft has just made the greatest investment in its history. And not in Openai, but in an unknown Dutch company

Nebius Group, an unknown company based in Amsterdam, has signed a surprising multiannual agreement worth $ 19.4 billion with Microsoft. It is in fact the largest investment ever made by the firm of Redmond, and the question, of course, is why.

What is Nebius Group. The company was founded in 1989 as Yandex NV, Yandex’s legal matrix, the well -known search engine that was a rival of Google in Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Nebius Group Yandex sold to a group of Russian investorschanged his name to the current one and focused on a key segment: that of artificial intelligence.

Data centers to power. Specifically, in the field of servers and data centers. Since then Nebius Group has been dedicated to providing cloud infrastructure for companies that develop and run AI models. Your rivals They are companies such as Coreweave, Crusoe or Lambda Labs, which are a step below the “hyperscators”, Aws, Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle.

The agreement. In it Document registered in the SEC The US indicates that Nebius will yield the computing capacity of the GPUS of its data centers in varisa phases this year and the one that comes, and that the total value of the contract will be 17.4 billion until 2031, with an option for Microsoft to extend those services worth 2,000 million additional dollars.

Microsoft cloud reinforcement. The agreement will allow Microsoft to access the computing resources available to Nebius in its Vineland Data Center (New Jersey, USA). It is a movement clearly for solve the shortage of resources that is coming when managing AI workloads: more and more users make use of this type of technology and Microsoft current data centers have a limited capacity.

More than OpenAi. The operation is even greater than the one that Redmond’s firm He did in Openai Estimated at $ 13,000. This alliance has allowed Microsoft to have exclusive access to OpenAi’s models and reuse them in the form of its Copilot platform. Meanwhile, Openai has been able to use the Microsoft infrastructure to train and serve those same models to the general public.

Nebius rises to the beast in the stock market. The agreement has triggered the value of Nebius’s shares, which had already folded their value in what we had been, but after the news They have grown 60%. The effect is contagious, because one of its srival, Coreweave, has also risen 5% in the stock market without having made any announcement: it has simply become possible candidate for Microsoft or any other large company to invest in its services soon.

European taste centers. Although it has roots in Russia, Nebius seems to want to leave that past behind to settle definitively in the European Union. The company current account with five data centers: three operations (Helsinki, New Jersey and Kansas City) and two in development (Keflavik, in Iceland, and Paris). The focus on the installation of data centers in European territory is clear, as these last two projects in full development demonstrate.

Another great “European” unicorn. After the creation of its Data Center in Paris – which will presume to have N200 N200 chips – Nebius announced its intention to invest more than 1,000 million dollars in mid -2025 in its AI infrastructure in Europe. Its new data centers in Paris and Iceland demonstrate that vocation, and the company is managing to capitalize on that commitment to AI. It is undoubtedly one of the last protagonists of the European technological scene, which little by little begins to raise alternatives. Freepik did it in Spainthey have done it Mistral and ASML with its unique agreement This week, and now Nebius does.

Image | Nebius

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