Nebius has appointed Raja Agrawal as Vice President for the Middle East and Africa, placing a Dubai-based executive at the center of its regional expansion as demand for AI infrastructure grows across enterprises, governments and research institutions.
The Amsterdam-headquartered AI cloud company said Agrawal will lead its go-to-market strategy across the region, with a mandate to expand customer adoption and build long-term partnerships in one of the world’s most active markets for artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure.
The appointment comes as governments and companies across the Gulf and the wider Middle East and Africa region move from AI pilots toward production workloads that require high-performance computing, reliable cloud capacity and specialized infrastructure for model training and inference.
Nebius describes itself as a full-stack AI cloud company, offering infrastructure and software for developers, startups and enterprises building AI products, agents and services. Headquartered in Amsterdam, the company operates globally.
A Dubai-Based Leadership Role
Agrawal will be based in Dubai, a location that gives Nebius proximity to major regional AI programs, sovereign-backed digital infrastructure initiatives and enterprise cloud transformation projects.
His appointment also signals a more direct commercial push in the Middle East and Africa. Nebius said it is establishing a local team in the region, initially focused on go-to-market functions. The first hires are already in place, creating a foundation for further customer engagement and expansion.
Agrawal brings more than two decades of experience across enterprise technology, cloud, AI, data and enterprise platforms. His career includes senior leadership roles at SAP, Microsoft and BrowserStack, where he worked with strategic customers, built regional teams and supported complex technology programs.
“This region’s commitment to AI and digital infrastructure remains both strategic and necessary,” Agrawal said in the announcement. He added that Nebius is focused on building trusted, long-term partnerships and helping organizations run AI workloads with the performance, resilience and economics they need.
Nebius’ MEA Strategy
Nebius’ Middle East and Africa push follows a period of rapid expansion for the company’s AI infrastructure business. In its first-quarter 2026 results, Nebius reported revenue of $399 million, up from $50.9 million a year earlier, while purchases of property, equipment and intangible assets reached $2.47 billion as the company continued to scale infrastructure.
The company has also been strengthening its global sales structure. In a May shareholder letter, Nebius said it had welcomed Agrawal as VP of Sales for the Middle East and Africa, alongside leadership hires in the Americas and Asia-Pacific and Japan.
The hiring pattern points to a company trying to match infrastructure expansion with regional customer coverage. AI cloud demand is not only about raw compute capacity. Large customers often need help around procurement, deployment planning, compliance, workload optimization and long-term capacity commitments.
Nebius’ positioning is aimed at that segment of the market: companies building or scaling AI systems that require infrastructure beyond standard cloud use cases.
AI Infrastructure Becomes a Regional Priority
The Middle East has become an increasingly visible market for AI infrastructure providers as governments place artificial intelligence at the center of economic diversification strategies. Enterprises are also under pressure to move beyond experimentation and show practical gains from AI across finance, public services, logistics, energy, health care and education.
Specialized AI cloud providers are competing to serve that shift. The market is shaped by access to GPUs, energy capacity, data center locations, latency requirements and the ability to support large-scale workloads at predictable cost.
Nebius says its platform is designed for AI from the ground up, covering workloads from data and model training to production deployment. The company describes its model as combining hyperscaler-style usability with infrastructure built for demanding AI workloads.
That positioning could be particularly relevant in the Middle East and Africa, where many organizations are still building internal AI capabilities and may prefer partners that can support both technical scale and regional execution.
Wider Partnerships and Capital Commitments
Nebius has also been building momentum through large infrastructure and technology partnerships. In March, the company announced a new AI infrastructure agreement with Meta with a contract value of up to approximately $27 billion over five years. The deal includes a $12 billion purchase of compute capacity scheduled to begin in early 2027, along with additional capacity commitments of up to $15 billion.
The same month, Nebius and NVIDIA announced a partnership to scale full-stack AI cloud infrastructure, with NVIDIA investing $2 billion in Nebius. The companies said the partnership would deepen collaboration across AI factory architecture, production software and high-performance compute.
Nebius is not entering the region as an early-stage infrastructure startup, but as a public AI cloud company trying to expand commercial reach while its global capacity footprint grows.
Agrawal’s appointment gives Nebius a named regional leader at a time when AI cloud providers are competing for enterprise, public sector and research customers across emerging AI hubs.
The company’s announcement frames the Middle East and Africa as a long-term growth region rather than a short-term sales market. With local hiring underway and a senior executive now based in Dubai, Nebius is moving to make that strategy more visible.
