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Arkady Volozh, founder of Yandex, the Russian Google, on July 16 announced the creation of a new company – called Nebius Group – that aims to build one of the world’s largest commercially available AI infrastructure businesses out of Europe.
Volozh is leading 1,300 employees, mostly ex-Yandex staff, to build Nebius, which, among other things, is developing a cloud computing platform specifically designed to support the training and running of large-scale AI models.
Nebius AI is targeting three groups of clients: companies training foundational models, companies – including large corporates – who need to finetune and run AI models, and AI application developers. Nebius’ headquarters and main R&D presence is in Amsterdam, with additional R&D hubs in Europe, North America and Israel. It is already serving customers globally, including Europe’s best-known AI start-ups in France and Germany, according to Volozh. Some 80% of its current clients are based in Silicon Valley.
The plan is to provide hundreds of megawatts of capacity in Europe for training LLMs – mostly in Northern Europe – where electricity is green and cheap- and then build smaller data centers all over the world that are closer to clients that need to run models.
The ability to secure GPUs governs how quickly companies can develop new artificial intelligence systems. The chips are so valuable that they are delivered to clients like the networking company Cisco by armored car. Demand is outstripping supply. What’s more, access to power is becoming a constraining issue in the U.S.as artificial intelligence and data centers are pushing America's aging power grid to the brink.
“Demand is high,” Volozh said in an interview with The Innovator. “Whatever we build is booked weeks and months in advance.”
Read on to learn more about this story and other important technology news impacting business.

India's antitrust body says Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging "in abusive conduct and practices", according to a July 12 Reuters report. The finding, which could pave the way for big App Store changes in India, follows the announcement in June by the European Commission that formally accused Apple's App Store of violating the EU's new Digital Markets Act.
Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of the European Union, Japan has now passed a law that will restrict Apple and Google from blocking third-party app stores for Japanese users on their platforms. The legislation is expected to come into force by the end of 2025 and aims to reduce app prices and create a more equitable market by forcing the tech giants to compete with smaller challengers.
All three developments look likely to upend the half a trillion dollar global app market, ushering in more competition and innovation at a time when a growing number of corporates want to launch platform businesses and are considering opening their own app stores.
“The opportunities for companies, for developers, for consumers and enterprise customers are very big,” says Paulo Trezentos, Founder and CEO of Portugal-based Aptoide, an alternative app distribution and payment processing platform, with over 430 million users, 100,000 developers, 1 billion downloads a year and around 5 million transactions. Aptoide in June launched the first free iPhone App Store alternative in Europe, after the EU forced Apple to allow the installation of alternative app stores on Apple devices.
Trezentos was a speaker on a July 11 panel about the app economy moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief during an online conference organized by Platform Leaders. The event brought together leading entrepreneurs, policy makers, academics, investors and practitioners to exchange insights and best practices on the future of AI, digital platforms and ecosystems.

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Attackers are no longer just hacking into companies; they are logging in. An estimated 80% of all breaches use compromised identities costing enterprises billions of dollars annually. With the proliferation of SaaS applications and AI, the volume of attacks targeting identities is also growing – at the rate of 71% year -over-year - according to the 2024 IBM Threat Intelligence Index.

That’s where Oleria comes in. The U.S. company, which was recently named a 2024 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, provides a platform that provides what it says is first-of-its-kind access visibility, including access usage insights, at an individual resource level, so Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) can answer the critical questions: Who has access to what? How did they get it? What are they doing with it?”

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