YouSaid · the spoken record

Roman Chernin

lines on the record: 59
first: 2026-06-08
most recent: 2026-06-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“To say kudos to the team. I don't think we celebrate enough. And I think that it's right we are not relaxed, but I think we could celebrate a little bit more, just give the team more respect and how much is done. And it was not easy and it's still not easy. And it will not be easy. But yeah, never stop. We cannot stop. It's like a shark. You're alive when you move, right? So this famous thing. So we have to move.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm Russian in this way. Like, Russians always know that you need to look in the very pragmatically and Russians always with these faces always expect something will happen. We need to be ready. You need to be ready. So it's a really important part that comes from our CEO also and founder Kaddy. You wake up and it's a new customer, new day. You need to deliver. Nothing is guaranteed. You need to concentrate on the work. And I know how much effort team is putting on things to work and how much depends on everyday's dedication and how fast market is moving and to stay relevant, you need to continue moving in the same pace or try to move in the same pace with the market. And I think that on a romantic note, I would say that we could celebrate a little bit more, but we just don't have time. To use opportunity, actually.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I would lie, I wouldn't say that we didn't notice it. Obviously, everybody noticed it and the stock jumped and it was a big news around. We take it as a justification of what we do. Then you got this justification, you say yourself, okay, those people still, they give you a credit that you will execute. I come back again and again to what we do is post-sale business. Every time we sign a deal, every time someone invests in us, they give us a credit and opportunity to deliver. But then go back to your job and deliver. And I think that we are in such a market where emotional market as well, that you should keep yourself down to the ground. Remember that all this growth, all these credits that customers give you, it's opportunity to deliver. Go do a job.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope it will not happen. As a business, I think that it's better for us as humans as well, for you and me. The world remain quite diversified in a different manners. And I'm optimistic here. I think that there are so many people that want to build something independently, let's say. Like there is a lot of people with the need to try things and build new things that”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But consolidation. Yeah, I think the main threat for Nibios as a business is the world will be too much consolidated. We try to be diversified. We try to solve problems of different customers and have different customers on different layers. If you'll end up in the world where, I don't know, three, five supermodel, super company, super empires control the world, then Nebius or companies like Nebios will be needed only to help them maybe serve their needs on physical layer. So I think that in general the consolidation is our main the more world democratized, the more world diversified, the more we need as a business.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I literally tell them is I think two things will be needed. I don't know what will be needed, but I'm sure that two things will be needed. One is being able to communicate with the people with MPati, with empathy communications, so like understand humans, communicate with humans and be empathic. And the second is creativity, all the art, I hope that art in a way will exist. So all the hard skills that I thought 10 years ago will be needed. I thought that the most important thing they need to learn is math and engineering. Now I'm far from this belief and I'm quite happy they much more in the soft skills than I was when I was a kid. Being able to communicate with humans, understand the humans, being empathic to the humans and have this creativity idea, like being able to try new things and like be creative. I think these two, if you can help your kids.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second orbital of all this kind of democratizing of the building. Also, what is challenging and what will need to be changed? And I think it's like as risk as an opportunity as how the education will change. Because now when everybody has access to intelligence, what should people learn? You definitely don't need them to learn the facts. Everything is available. Like all the knowledge is kind of available. How do you really train people to think when they don't need to think so much, how to teach people to continuously change like many professions will be not stable? How do you help people to find themselves in the changing environment, think and learn the new concepts constantly? This is something that very, like a lot of gives a lot of new opportunities, but also creates a lot of risks.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data centers technicians? No, probably it will be robots. So on a serious note, one thing that obviously happening is with democratizing what people called being developer, right? Now each of us can be a developer. What I mean being developer is to convert the idea in some digital asset. I hope that this democratizing of building letting each of us being builder will open up so many opportunities and that we even don't imagine yet when we will give like millions of new people, tens of millions of new peoples' ability just to convert their idea into something that works very easily. We will see a lot of new businesses and a lot of new ideas just coming in life and they will create a lot of new works that we don't even think exist. So it's like second.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think everything we see is nuts. My view is very simple. So many smart people now working to make it happen. So most likely, I may be less pessimistic that we'll see, I don't know what is there. We'll build more in space than on Earth in three years. Maybe not in three years. My view, I'm humble enough to say that so many smart people are trying to solve this task and bring compute to the space that why wouldn't I believe it will happen? I think there are a lot of challenges still, a lot of things to figure out. But if someone would say us that even three years ago that we will build like multi-gigawatt data centers, it will be like large interconnected compute clusters, would you believe? I didn't think like that. We are here. It's routine.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We come from the place, we always think that we didn't do enough. I think that we got quite a progress in the places where we started building. Historically, we had more experience in Europe. We now probably 75% of the new capacity that we build midterm is in the US. So we built a lot of presence on the ground and to communicate with those local communities in the US. And we try to do the best job. We need to do better always, but we are moving.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the environment we need to work in? There are two sides of the thing. One is how we think pragmatically as a business. That's what I said. We think about it as a portfolio.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We fulfill them with GPUs. Every next stage requires more capital, but we do as much as possible in advance to make sure that when we will be on the next stage, we already have power secured, when we will have enough capital to deploy in GPUs, we will have data centers that up and running. So it's like phases of investments. And again, the bottlenecks are different on the different time span perspective. So obviously if you have more capital, you can move faster. Not in six months, but in whatever 18, 24 months for sure.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually a great question. And like our investors sometimes ask us, like, what is the main bottleneck? And the main bottleneck, again, it's everything. You need to look at this from the time span perspective. In the next six months, the capital cannot help. Six months is too short time. You have what you have, you need to deliver. Then in the next 12 months, you can accelerate something, but it's more like capacity constraints. And in the next 12 months, we can accelerate with the capital or with execution something. But then in 24 months, you definitely can unlock so many things. We are not building one data center. It's also important to understand. We are building the portfolio, the portfolio of capacity. The more execution power we have, the more capital we have. We can do the things in parallel. That's why we do how we do. We secure power and land, then we build data centers.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Centers and fulfill them with GPUs, like just build faster. Our CapEx program this year is 2025 billion dollars. Our competitors, hyperscalers, have 10 times, like eight times bigger if I would have 10 times bigger capital, I would just build more data centers and fulfill them with GPUs faster and serve more customers. That's what we started with. Like what would I do if I had 10 times more supply? I would move faster.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four dimensions, build scale, build product, work with customers. It's actually like two dimensions we discussed, like scale and product. The thought is customers. We are in the field business. We like to say that cloud is post-sales business. When you sell, you sell the promise. And then the customer, you need to satisfy the customer. And working with the customers, covering the customers, having this strong customer facing engineering team, FDE team, this is the third dimension. Go talk to your customers. Make sure that they know you, that you know them. This is the third dimension. And the fourth, the most boring, but also the most exciting, is the capital. We are in the capital intensive game and we're competing with the most capitalized companies in the world.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The better engineers that NVIDIA think about you, the better relations and partnership, I think it enables. And again, we may be wrong thinking this way, but that's what we see like we can do. And we just focus on being reasonable and being kind of focused on the long-term value. It sounds like fluffy, everybody say it. But do your fucking job at the end of the day, right?”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who has power against Nvidia? We look at this in a very simple manner. We just need to build what we build. We need to build our product. We need to tell our story. And then the rest will complement it. I think what is the most fascinating, Nvidia is still for big extent is an engineer's driven company. And I think the best thing you can do to get respect from NVIDIA, it's my read. They may have a different point of view. But if engineers in Nvidia respect your engineers, you will have the right foundation for relations, let's say. We managed to prove again and again we know what we build and we have a strong engineering team. And I think that they see it and they respect it. And we have a lot of engineers to engineers relations on physical, like on a hardware level, on the software layer, on the insurance platform layer.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we built infrastructure, so we are quite happy here. I think it's a good place to be in the current world, even though for some extent we are building kind of the easiest part. It's complex execution, but we kind of know what's needed and our customers help us to understand what's needed. I think the most amazing people in this industry are those who take a risk to go and build end-user products, in my view. They actually drive the most of growth here. People who take a risk, like the real risk of building something people would need or not need, I think this is the heroes of our AI journey.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question, but looks like the world is divided. We may not like it, having good enough foundational models available for the big parts of the world is important. And I think here in Europe, we should think how we have enough capabilities available here. We had a lot of conversations over the last couple of years in about the sovereignty.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need all the models, the smartest one for the most complex intelligence and the fast models that can do quick iterations. And again, we don't speak even about all the modalities and like what we'll need in the physical AI world and so on. So I think, again, my point, we will have enough of PI for different models. And what we need to do as an infrastructure company is just help or extend we can to make developers comfortable how they use all these capabilities that models provide. Because as you rightly said, it's not about model capabilities. It's not only about model capabilities. It's about not plumbing, getting them working, getting them optimized, getting them reliable.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's even want to be the customer task to choose which model to call now. It will be the engine that knows all the capabilities, like all the models underneath. And then when you go to OpenAI and you do the research, you don't think in terms of how many loops you wanted to make, you don't think in terms when it should go to LLM and when it should go to search. You don't think should it now call which prompt to call, right? It's happening. You give a task, there is an engine, the reasoning engine that decides how to run this task and you got the result. So I think that a lot of enterprise cases, a lot of these authentic tasks will be solved in the same way when it's not you as a developer that focusing on customer need will need to kind of orchestrate all these tokens and models. And then we will”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but my point is closed models with open source models, it's not about reliable or not reliable. Again, the work of the companies like Nabul is to make possible, like as you say, not think about plumbing if you want to use alternative models. But I think it's about capabilities. I think that closed source models like frontier models are great and they will become even better and they will solve so many problems that we don't solve yet. And we have such a diversity of the use cases we want to solve that there will be market for the smartest models of the world, the fastest models of the world, the in-between models of the world, smart enough, but cheap enough. And you as a customer will be able to just pick the right source of token for each particular task. And back to the authentic layer point.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. No, I don't want to speak about it. No, but I can say that in total, I think they grow like this. We all see the CI companies reporting IRR growth, right? For them, it's not IRR. It's like their budget. But I think that the most advanced companies, their AI budget, and it's not like this fake, all this tokymaxing race, we see it like how they do it in the production workload. So they grow the same pace like this AI native company is reporting they are growing their AI consumption equal to their IRR. So the companies like Rivalio, they're growing the same exponential trajectory.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think everybody is speaking the same thing, like how fast it's growing. When we see this trajectories of some companies, like Anthropic and Cursor and Cognition and Coding, and now we see start seeing another verticals as well, some healthcare examples, some financial use cases, I think, I think it's”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build cyber defense agents. And again, they don't start from the scratch. They take some of the open source foundational model, but then they train it for the particular case optimized for the quality and the latency that needed in this cyber defense use cases. And I think we'll continue to see it. We'll see a lot of specialized post-trained models that still need optimized inference and optimized infrastructure around them to let customers use them.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I think that it's a good chance that we'll continue to see a lot of niche models show up and improved. I don't know, again, I'm a believer that we're quite far from the wall and we will see a lot of models improvement happening. I think that what we also see is much more new modalities and specialized models coming in game. So we speak about these frontier LLMs, but there is entire world of life science models, robotics, world models, video models, image models. They all have their own use cases as well. And we see more and more small specialized models of particular use cases coming. Just this morning I spoke with a team here in Israel that develops cyber defense foundational model, like the model that optimized.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe not on other benchmarks and so on, and you want to have flexibility, you want someone to support you on experimenting and actually adopting the new best models for your use case every time they come online. And then like the platforms like ours abstracts from you all the work that you need to do to actually change from one model to another to benchmark all of them and so on. You can be sure that you will be on the frontier every time something new is happening it will be in the platform, you will be able to test it if it works better for your use case. You will be able to switch and it all will be kind of smooth and transparent for you.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's not the magic again. You take the model, like some baseline model, and then you can optimize it for particular scenarios that you have. So you can actually distill the model, you can make the set, like the smaller model that works with the same quality. You can do spec decoding. You can optimize caching and so on and so forth. So you take the model and out of this model, you actually build a system that in your particular case works with your requirements with optimized economics. And by the way, one of the things that also I think important for customers to use managed platforms like Token Factory, the models are changing every week, every month, like right today, minimax three was released, and there is Nimatron Ultra that was announced. This happens every few weeks. And every time the new model released, it may work better on some batchmarks.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About all the rest. We will apply all the optimization techniques, we'll manage the better economics for you, it will be reliable, you don't need to think about the next 100 GPUs where you will find them. It's like managed service.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to really extract the value you expect. You need to do optimizations. You need to deploy it in a proper way. You need not just one GPU tokens extraction or one host setting, but you're the large product. You run on hundreds of thousands GPUs already. You need all the orchestration. You need the caching. You need the observability like your customers ask you how does it work and so on and so forth. And by the way, you had all of that on OpenAI because this is like the production service for you. You don't think about infrastructure when you work with OpenAI. Just subscribe for the plan you need and you pay for whatever end result. And so that's where you need the product like Token Factory. Token Factory gives you the managed inference with the open source or specialized models. You can run existing open source vanilla open source model or you can tune the model and deploy your own weights. And then we'll take care of...”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, good enough. You build your great product with OpenAI. You cracked the use case and you started growing and you have amazing traction. The only problem may be you don't have enough margin or you want to start applying more aggressively the data and tune the behavior of the model and you cannot do it in a closed ecosystem. So you go to internet and you read there are a lot of great open source models that on the benchmarks are close to OpenAI and you think, oh, great, it will be 10 times cheaper, inference is cheaper. I can tune those models. I can apply my data and my product will be better, my growth will accelerate. So you go, you take the weights from hugging face, you take some engine to run it like VLLM, SGLM, something, and then it doesn't work because”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like compare with others, but the principles we build are full stack, we call it full stack integration. And you can think about it like full stack down and full stack up. Full stack down is we are really deep in physical world. We build data centers. We build racks and servers. We build the platform. And when you control these things downstream, you can move faster and you can squeeze more cost and provide more economically viable solutions for the customers. And then your vertical integration upstream is actually what we spoke about.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the developer, all the complexity of infrastructure, some complexity of AI, like how you tune the model or how you optimize the inference, it's a lot like research heavy area as well. And just let people focus on their customers and use case. By the way, the same way like they do with closed ecosystems like Anthropics, OpenAIs.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Iran. So people like this flywheel analogy. Like, you run inference, you generate data, you can observe this data, then you can improve the model that you run and kind of continue improve the quality of the end product. So I think there are a lot of pieces, both on system level and both on AI magic level, if you want. And I think the most fascinating moment for me is that I think what we see is that barrier to build is going down. So we see more and more customers like builders coming to the market that not necessarily AI researchers or not necessarily inference engineers. And the value that companies like Nebulus can create is actually to lower the barrier to build AI-enabled products and AI-enabled applications that really work and incorporate like”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody's talking about this moving from training to inference. I think it's just very hundred thousand feet like view because this move means actually people build specific products and in those products they have their economics, they have their trajectory of growth and it's not just like whatever. The same GPU is just used for other purposes. I think it brings the new requirements. You need to build your inference platform. You need to help your customers not only run inference but where the model that the inference come from. Everybody is taking open source models and fine-tune or rel them. So how do we help them? And then when they run them, they generate a lot of data. How do we help our customers like when they already run their application, their inference to collect the data, to create it and then use it to improve the model or the application that they”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What customer needs, you know, you speak with a lot of product founders. And this is the same what customer needs at the end of the day, how customers evolve in their needs, where is the demand moving. So it's like we see all this transition from training to inference, we see transition from just using the models to building agents, and we see the transition from mostly AI labs consuming AI compute to enterprises coming in the game. And all the time, if we want to be relevant, we need to follow the changes. And this is the main question which we ask us in the product. What customer needs and what is Nebus, what is our value that we need to create? Because again, we are a small company. We cannot build everything. And we need to be very precise on what we can do better than others and where the value that we should focus on given how customers are evolving.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can run there if you talk about inference, how much tokens you can extract. We see all this optimizations that are happening that changes the price of the tokens in order of magnitude. So people so much speak about the cost of particular GPU, but if you do the right thing with the model, you can change the price like in the times. And this all should work together as a system, not just as a, again, if you speak about road infrastructure, then you can manage only the price. But if you build a platform and if you provide the high level of the service to the customer, then you can extract much more economics, not only from the infrastructure cost structure, right?”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Situation and then absolutely elastic prices. They are elastic for some extent, but we also want to be meaningful and we want to be thoughtful kind of what our customers need. And by the way, it's not only GPU hour cost. It's all the optimizations you do, all the real, we call it TCO, total cost of ownership that you like. And this is partially why we build the software platform. And I'm sorry, come back to product again and again. You want to speak about capacity, but people too much obsessed about capacity, like capacity is opponent, too much obsessed about the nominal price of capacity. You can price GPU $3, $4.5 depending on the use case and depending on the quality of the platform, it can create completely different outcomes for the customer in real cost. How long it works? Like what is the effective uninterrupted time that you”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a difficult question. We actually raised prices like just 30%. Yeah, just a couple months ago. And we still have pipeline pressure, let's say, on supply. And again, we don't really know where is the balance. And I will tell you why. It's not only us being greedy and want to get as much money and like then people in the shortage will have to pay. For some extent it works. Like people need compute to build. But then there is a point, and especially it's less in training because in training it's like one of cost. But if you believe that we're moving to inference and inference is the cost of serving the customer, there is a level where economics doesn't work. And the economics of the products of our customers, if they work, they can grow and then we can grow with them. It's not like just supply demands.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. And again, we don't know where the world will end up. And in the world of infinitive demand, you may sustain even long-term, mid-term selling this whole burmel kind of contracts. But the more competition, let's say, you have from the demand side, you can be picky, even with the customers you work with and work with the customers that value the platform that we build more. And there are different customers in the world, someone more obsessed.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demanding and they need the most scaled infrastructure in the world that exists. So sometimes people say it's commodity, but it's not really commodity on that scale. Like nothing commodity when it comes to the real scale. But again, to your point, this is quite a small population of the customers that you can work with and you're not necessarily need all the full stack software to work with them. So we intentionally building and from day zero of Nebius, we were building this software stack because we thought that it's much more beneficial for us. And if I want to be pathetic for the world to have someone who can support customers not only on this physical infrastructure layer, but beyond.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and I would say it's a main question of our business. I mean, not nebulous even, but the product category. And we always told it publicly and to our investors and to our customers that we believe that long-term strategy of Nebios is to serve as much diversified portfolio as possible. We do the best to have many customers that we work with. We build the platform. In reality, again, to serve dozen of the customers of the world and like of the level of Meta and Microsoft, which super advanced and they have their entire software stack, they literally need only physical infrastructure. They bring everything they have, deploy on your infrastructure and run, right? You have a tiny, tiny additional value that you can provide them above physical infrastructure. By the way, to satisfy them with what they need on physical infrastructure is quite a challenge because you can imagine they are quite”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managed infrastructure, there are hundreds on inference, there are thousands on Agentik. There will be tens of thousands of new developers that build it, right?”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question, not overnight, but we definitely have demand for that. And I think the key question for us, it's not, do we have demand or not, but how we actually build the portfolio of demand? Because you have so many customers on this market that you can balance between. And again, to the point of followers of the product, you can sell bare metal, you can sell managed customers, managed infrastructure, you can sell inference, and maybe in the future you can sell new layers of product. And I think what we try to do is to build quite diversified portfolio of customers. We believe that the highest tech we move, the more value potentially we can create for the customers. And actually, the highest tech we move, the bigger population of the customers we can serve. Because again, like on bare metal level, you have maybe dozen of the customers in the world that you can work with.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This quality, maybe we can help you to optimize it. And again, this is just to make it sure. It's a kind of a little bit speculative thinking about what's next. It's not like what we already have. But this is where we see our customers evolving and where we think that we could create the next layer of the product offering.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we would love to bring on that level is the same what we do on the layers below is the optimization engine. You can build your agent in so many kind of open source or appropriate tools. But then when you need to scale it, you start thinking about the economics, you start thinking about reliability, reliable execution, like repeatable execution. And this is where it's not just model choice problem. It's not just outcome problem, but it's a system problem. You need to make it reliable. You need to make it repeatable, and you need to make it economically viable. And that's probably where Nebius could create the value the same way. Like we don't tell people how to build their applications. We just say, okay, if you need this model to work for you with this economics, we will help you to optimize. The same here. If you need this agent end-to-end run with this budget.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Microsoft or OpenAI. People speak megabatts there. So it's like you deliver the megabatts of compute. Then when you speak about this managed cloud, people speak GPU hours because this is the key unit you sell, the efficient hours you can spend on compute with storage, with complementary services, but you still buy managed but compute.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second layer is what we call multi-tank cloud, still addressing research heavy teams, but now we have hundreds or thousands that they don't want to deal with the physical infrastructure. They want to deal with the managed infrastructure. Classical infrastructure as a service in the cloud terms. You have storage compute, networking, virtualized in a good environment with API, observability, security, everything that normal teams expect cloud to have. You log in, you get your cluster provision, and you can start training or run inference if you need and manage your application or manage your workflow yourself, but have infrastructure figure it out for you. So still, if the first layer speaks in megawatts, literally like if you read a announcement, someone signed a large deal with some like”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this AI journey from the people who first of all built the models, right? So that was companies like OpenAI in Hyperscalers Large Labs and so on. And what they need from you as an infrastructure provider is barely compute, like just raw infrastructure. And we see a lot of these large bare metal deals on the market. And we also do them. But this is only the first layer of what we build. Scaled physical infrastructure that customers like Meta, Microsoft in our case can consume on large volumes.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everywhere. So, when we think about how we build a company, we talk about it in four dimensions. One dimension is capacity, how much megawatts, gigawatts, and the GPUs we deploy. We are infrastructure company, we need to be large. If you are not large enough, nobody needs us to exist. This is the physical world expansion. The team is doing an amazing job, but it's never enough and you want to move as fast as possible. And there are a lot of complications of the real world that prevent you to move fast enough sometimes to launch new data center. You need to go through the entire supply chain, regulatory and fires and waters. Everything that happens in the real world. So this is one dimension. Another dimension is the product. You want to move fast enough to address new types of the workloads, new types of the customers that coming to the market. Think about it. We started as an industry.”
2026-06-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source