Volozh's fortune rose $0.5 bln in a day after Nebius agreement with Meta

Arkady Volozh's fortune reached $4.4 billion, increasing by $0.5 billion in just one day, the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires ranking shows. The sharp jump was due to the growth of shares of his AI company - cloud provider Nebius. As a result, the businessman has made an impressive leap: if on March 1, 2026, he occupied the 1325th line of the world list with a capital of $3.2 billion, then by March 17 he entered the first thousand of the richest people on the planet, positioned in 947th place.

On March 16, quotes of Nebius soared by 15%, after it became known that the company entered into a five-year agreement with Meta Platforms to supply artificial intelligence infrastructure worth up to $27 billion. This deal became one of the largest contracts ever concluded by the technology giant. And on March 11, chip maker Nvidia announced a $2 billion investment in Nebius. As a result, in less than a week, the market value of Volozh's AI company increased by almost 40%.

Nebius securities fell 5.7% in the pre-market on March 17 as the group said it plans a private placement of convertible bonds totaling $3.75 billion.

Nebius was the Dutch holding company of Russian internet giant Yandex until 2024. It changed its name after its Russian assets were sold to a group of investors for $5.2 billion, while it retained its international business. Prior to that, Volozh's best ranking in the Forbes ranking was 2021, when his fortune was almost half what it is now - it was estimated at $2.3 billion.

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