Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTMatthew FieldSun, June 7, 2026 at 5:00 PM GMT+2 3 min readArkady Volozh co-founded the £50bn Nebius, one of Europe’s fastest-growing technology companies - SERGEI GUNEYEV/GettyThe billionaire tech exile behind one of Russia’s biggest companies has pledged to invest almost £2bn in Britain’s AI data centre building spree.Arkady Volozh, who co-founded Yandex and is worth an estimated $7bn, said he planned to more than triple the company’s UK headcount and spend almost £1.7bn on three new data centres around the country.Mr Volozh will make the investment through his company, the £50bn US-listed AI giant Nebius, which was carved off from Yandex in 2024 in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.He said: “The UK is one of the few places where AI is being built, deployed, and adopted at the same time – by startups, by enterprises, and by the public sector. The work is happening here and the demand is here. And we are also here for the long run.”Nebius’s announcement comes before London Tech Week, with the Prime Minister set to give an opening address to industry leaders at the event on Monday.Labour has been seeking to woo investment from technology giants to fund Sir Keir Starmer’s ambitions to make the UK an AI “superpower”.As part of its plans for a 20-fold increase in public computing capacity, the Government has announced a new supercomputer and so-called AI growth zones which will house data centres. These data centres are needed to help develop new AI apps or to power existing tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude.Nebius’s new sites will offer around 65MW of data centre power by 2027 aimed at British start-ups such as Revolut, which uses the company’s AI computing power to run its fraud detection systems.It will also target new pharmaceutical start-ups developing drugs using the latest machine-learning technology.The UK facilities will be based on leased infrastructure and are already hooked up to the power grid, with Nebius supplying powerful AI processors to fill the racks in the centres.Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, said: “Nebius’s investment brings significant AI compute into the UK, giving companies what they need to train, test and run advanced systems here at home – helping drive productivity by rolling AI out widely across the economy.”London Tech Week kicks off on Monday as the Government seeks to make the UK an AI ‘superpower’ - Chris Ratcliffe/BloombergNebius was formed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Yandex was forced into a complex restructuring to carve off its Russian division as it grappled with sanctions and pressure from the Kremlin.Mr Volozh formally renounced his Russian citizenship earlier this year and has lived in Israel with his family since 2014.Now based in the Netherlands and listed in the US, Nebius has emerged as one of Europe’s fastest-growing technology companies.Terms and Privacy PolicyPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info