Arkady Volozh

Arkady Volozh was born in 1964 in Atyrau

Volozh was born in 1964 in Guryev, Kazakh SSR, now Atyrau in Kazakhstan, to a Russian-Jewish family. His father was a petroleum geologist and his mother taught music.

He attended the Republican School of Physics and Mathematics in Almaty. He then studied applied mathematics at the Gubkin oil and gas university in Moscow and graduated in 1986.

In 1989 he co-founded CompTek and began working on search technology, and in 1990 he set up Arkadia, which made search software. He co-founded Yandex in 1997 and became its CEO in 2000. In 2007 he helped create the Yandex School of Data Analysis and headed a data analysis department at MIPT.

After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he moved to Tel Aviv. In June 2022 the EU placed sanctions on him after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he left all his roles at Yandex. The sanctions were lifted in March 2024.

In July 2024 the remaining non-Russian assets of Yandex N.V. became Nebius Group, which he leads as CEO with a focus on cloud services for artificial intelligence. He lives in Tel Aviv with his family and has 6 children.