AI company Nebius Group, headed by Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh, together with Uber Technologies will invest up to $375 million in Avride, a Texas-based developer of self-driving cars and delivery services. This is stated in a press release from Nebius, which is available to OnInvest. Avride is one of the businesses included in the Nebius Group, but operating under its own brand.

Details

The funding will allow Avride to accelerate the growth of its robotaxi fleet, strengthen its artificial intelligence-based developments and expand into new markets, Nebius said in a statement.

The investment will build on Avride and Uber's commercial partnership, which began in 2024 with the signing of a multi-year strategic agreement, the company said in a press release. For Nebius Group, this is an important step in realizing its strategy to attract strategic partners to accelerate the development of Avride and other non-core assets, the company said.

"We are delighted to welcome Uber as a strategic investor who shares Avride's vision to help the company move further and faster in AI-powered autonomous transportation technology," said Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius Group, he said in a statement.

In the morning trading on October 22, Nebius shares were growing by about 1.5%. Since the beginning of the year the market capitalization of Nebius has soared by 276%, Uber - by 54%.

Context

In early September, Nebius announced a five-year, $17.4 billion contract with tech giant Microsoft (with an option to expand to $19.4 billion) to supply graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure for cloud-based AI computing. The deal includes Microsoft's access to dedicated capacity in a new data center in New Jersey, which is expected to launch in late 2025. Following the announcement, Nebius shares soared more than 60% in trading.

Nebius also followed that up with a $3.75 billion stock and convertible bond offering, raising the price of the securities by 44% over what it was before the Microsoft contract was announced.

Wall Street analysts called cloud provider Nebius' deal with Microsoft a turning point for the company. In their opinion, this agreement will be the main driver of Nebius' revenue growth in the coming years.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor

Share