Arkady Volozh Net Worth in 2026: How the Yandex Founder Quietly Became a $7 Billion Man Again

The way Arkady Volozh’s fortune has fluctuated and recovered over the last four years has an almost cinematic quality. According to Forbes, his current net worth is approximately $7.2 billion as of mid-May 2026, ranking him around #536 on the global list. Naturally, that figure fluctuates every day, sometimes even every hour, based on the performance of Nebius Group’s shares on the Nasdaq that afternoon. And they’ve made a lot of decisions lately.

It was not intended for Volozh to return here. His name appeared on the EU sanctions list in early 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his ownership of Yandex, the business he had spent more than 20 years creating, became something of a frozen artifact. His wealth plummeted to about $580 million, a humiliating decline for a man who had been watching Yandex, which was worth $30 billion just a year before. Looking back, it seems like very few people outside of his immediate social circle anticipated that he would be able to climb out of that hole. Seldom are Russian businessmen under sanctions.

However, he took action that the majority of them did not. He said something. He referred to the war as “barbaric” in August 2023, a statement that had more weight than someone else’s because so few members of the Russian business elite had expressed any opinion at all. The EU quietly allowed the sanctions to expire in a matter of months. In July 2024, Yandex NV, the Dutch parent company, sold its Russian operations to a local consortium for $5.4 billion, making it the biggest corporate exit from Russia to date. What was left, including the global cloud, the data infrastructure, and the aspirations for artificial intelligence, was renamed Nebius Group and listed on the Nasdaq.

The interesting part of the recent net-worth math is the Nebius story. With relatively little fanfare, the company went public in October 2024. Then came the AI infrastructure boom: Nvidia invested $2 billion, Microsoft signed a multibillion-dollar cloud and data center contract, and more recently, Volozh’s personal wealth increased by about half a billion dollars on a single trading day in March 2026, thanks to a partnership with Meta. It’s the kind of run that makes you question how much sleep anyone at Nebius is getting.

However, it’s remarkable how little of Volozh is truly visible to the general public. He doesn’t use his earnings to tweet. The loud podcast circuit is not what he does. He’s reportedly the type of person who shows up at small tech meetups and listens more than he speaks, as he strolls through Tel Aviv, where he’s lived since 2014. According to a number of profiles, he is quiet, technical, and sometimes awkward—the exact opposite of the arrogant oligarch archetype. The contrast with the more assertive members of his former Moscow peer group is difficult to ignore.

The actual wealth is highly concentrated. He owns about 13% of Nebius through a family trust, so his number fluctuates with NBIS in a manner that more diversified billionaires do not. For the time being, investors appear to support the AI infrastructure thesis, but it’s still unclear if neoclouds, the smaller, GPU-rich rivals of AWS and Google Cloud, will maintain their valuations after the current capex craze subsides. In a sense, Volozh has been here before; Yandex used to have similarly lofty expectations.

He officially renounced his Russian citizenship in February 2026. Perhaps the more significant headline of the two, it’s a minor detail that’s easy to overlook amid the clamor of his rising stock price. After all, the funds have previously increased. It hadn’t been a clean break.