AI Cloud CTO: Which Engineering Skills Are Most In-Demand Right Now

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**Danila Shtan** (1:00)
I think the promise of agents will do everything is bullshit.

**Patrick Akil** (1:04)
This is Danila Shtan, CTO of Nebius, one of the biggest AI cloud providers.

**Danila Shtan** (1:10)
You can't imagine how hard it is to be one of the first to adopt new NVIDIA chips in production for a large customer. Working with an AI agent is not dissimilar to working with a junior engineer. People want Claude Code not because they want an agent to work for them. They want Claude Code because it's a hyped tool and everyone's talking about that.

**Patrick Akil** (1:30)
Can people use agentic tooling within the hiring process?

**Danila Shtan** (1:34)
No.
Very task-oriented, very mechanical. This is a cohort of engineers that are at risk right now.

**Patrick Akil** (1:42)
Beyond Coding For the people that don't know, what does Nebius do?

**Danila Shtan** (1:48)
Nebius is a cloud company, but because we've started pretty late in the game, so like just for the scale. Four years ago, there was no Nebius. Three and a half years ago, there was an idea that we know what to build, and it turned out something completely different. The current shape of being the AI-oriented cloud, so mainly focused on GPUs, AI workloads, et cetera, then came up about like two, two and a half years ago.
So we were late to the game for the cloud stuff, and had to find a niche, and ChaiGPT was released, Llama was released, everything started moving to the direction that we see it now, and we decided, well, this might be something we can be successful, and we built that. So yeah, the AI cloud.
The cloud, but mainly focused on AI-centric workloads, mainly enabled by GPUs, and having access to an enormous amount of GPUs is one of our main assets that we build upon.

**Patrick Akil** (2:56)
It's interesting that you said you're kind of late to the game, and it could be my ignorance, but doing my research, I thought you were a little bit early. Like who are people that were earlier in the space or companies?

**Danila Shtan** (3:06)
I'm in the general cloud business.

**Patrick Akil** (3:08)
Yeah.

**Danila Shtan** (3:09)
AWS released their first service in what was it, like 2003

**Patrick Akil** (3:13)
But specifically AI cloud.

**Danila Shtan** (3:16)
I think this is a little bit of an artificial niche, to be honest, right? Because while the demand for AI workloads is immense, and it will only grow, but with the whole penetration of the market and growth, it will blur. And I think in five years we won't be talking AI clouds. It's going to be clouds again, just clouds.
But even for AI specific workloads, there were a number of American companies that were way earlier than we were. CoreWeave is a nice example. Lambda Labs were pretty famous when we started. Cruzo is still somewhat relevant, et cetera. Most of these companies kind of phased out of like cloud business and focused more on like building large scale facilities, etc. But they were definitely, we were definitely not the first.

**Patrick Akil** (4:17)
Yeah. Who are some of your customers that people will recognize?

**Danila Shtan** (4:21)
It's a hard question for me, because I'm not sure which customers I'm supposed to not supposed to disclose. But we are pretty proud about the ones that we can disclose there on our website. But I think we've had a chat with every major AI lab out there, for sure. Some of those are our customers.
A lot of AI friendly enterprises, the companies that you don't really think about as like, well, this is an AI company. Actually have a lot of AI going in the background, and they are also the customers. So I think there are some logos that everyone will recognize, for sure.