Chernin: Future AI compute demand will be driven by traditional enterprises
Roman Chernin · Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 8, 2026 · at 33:34
Roman Chernin is the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius, an AI infrastructure cloud provider. He outlines Nebius' long-term positioning strategy compared to raw compute providers.
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“We believe long-term better positioning for going to enterprises where we believe eventually a lot of demand will come from. Again, now most of our segment is working. It's AI natives working with AI natives, but we have a huge economics, a huge market of enterprises, existing companies, and someone needs to serve them and they will not buy role compute. They will need platforms.”
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“On bare metal level, you have maybe a dozen of the customers in the world that you can work with. On managed infrastructure, there are hundreds. On inference, there are thousands. On agentic, there will be tens of thousands of new developers that build it, rig…”
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“So I remember that Nebel stock went down 40% in one week or so in February, I think it was February or March, 20, 24, or 2025. And anecdotal story, the same exact week, we probably had the best week in sales.”
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“Every time we got intelligence cheaper. This, the same unit of intelligence cheaper. We are not reducing the consumption, but we increasing the consumption because we can just Solve more complex tasks with the same budget, or we can finally economically viably…”