# Yandex Russia's dominant search engine and technology company, founded in 1997 by [[Arkady Volozh]] and Ilya Segalovich and often described as "the Russian Google." At its height it ran search, maps, ride-hailing, delivery, cloud, media and autonomous-vehicle businesses, and its news aggregator was one of the most consequential information chokepoints in the Russian-speaking internet. ## The 2024 split After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the company's Amsterdam-domiciled parent, Yandex N.V., was cut off from its own Russian operations by sanctions, capital controls and a halted Nasdaq listing. The resolution came in **July 2024**: a Russian consortium bought the **Russia-based assets for $5.4 billion** — the largest corporate exit from Russia since the invasion, and at a price widely reported as a steep discount enforced by the requirement that Western sellers accept one. The Dutch parent retained four businesses with no Russian domicile — AI cloud, data labelling, autonomous driving and edtech — **renamed itself [[Nebius]] Group in August 2024**, and resumed Nasdaq trading that October. The Yandex name and the Russian business now belong to the consortium; the international remnant is Nebius. ## Why it is in this KB Two reasons, and they pull in different directions: - **As an information system.** Yandex is a working example of a search-and-news monopoly inside an authoritarian information environment — the algorithmic curation of a national news feed under state pressure. That is directly comparable to the platform-governance questions the vault tracks in the US and Europe. - **As a corporate lineage.** The company's non-Russian half is now [[Nebius]], which on **2026-09-08** became [[Palantir]]'s named preferred **sovereign AI infrastructure partner**. The vault had no Yandex page at all when that deal was logged, which made the lineage invisible at exactly the moment it became relevant. ⚠️ The split is complete and documented; **this lineage is context, not an allegation of ongoing Russian control** of Nebius. > [!note] Stub > Minimum-viable page created 2026-09-27 to close a recurring gap in the foreign-influence layer. Expand with the news-aggregator law and state-pressure history, the ownership structure before 2024, and the consortium that bought the Russian assets.