Nebius Academy: closing the gap between AI tools and the people who use them
Nebius Academy: closing the gap between AI tools and the people who use them
Most organizations have access to more models, copilots, and agents than they know what to do with. The challenge is finding people who can use those tools well, and building relevant AI skills across a team or an entire company. Nebius Academy exists to close that gap.
Nebius Academy is the education and research hub of Nebius. We train organizations for AI adoption, certify engineers in AI cloud skills, and fund academic research with compute grants. Across all three, the goal is the same: empowering individuals and organizations with the skills, mindset, and business habits that make AI access translate into revenue. Because Nebius Academy is built inside an AI infrastructure company, every program is taught by practitioners who run AI in production.
This post lays out all three in one place, so you can find the part that fits your team.
Nebius Certifications: proving AI skills
Skills need proof. So we built Nebius Certifications: role-based credentials that verify what someone can actually do with AI cloud technologies. Each certification is a bundle of training and an exam, with the training designed to prepare for the credential rather than for general upskilling. Passing earns an official Nebius certificate and a Credly digital badge to share, plus a promo code with free Nebius credits, and it gives teams and partners a way to build recognized in-house expertise on the Nebius stack.
The track covers five roles. As of July 2026, two exams are live and two open in Q3.
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AI CloudOps Engineer (live) is for tech professionals building infrastructure in the AI cloud and deploying AI/ML workloads;
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Agentic AI Builder (live) is for software engineers building AI workflows and applications with Nebius Token Factory, including agentic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and fine-tuning;
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AI Cloud Leader (live) is a knowledge-based certification that verifies foundational understanding of AI and AI cloud technologies for business roles;
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AI Infrastructure Engineer (Q3 2026) is for experienced DevOps and CloudOps engineers who build and maintain GPU infrastructure;
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AI Solutions Architect (Q3 2026) is an advanced certification for engineers designing complete AI infrastructure solutions on Nebius AI Cloud.
Nebius Research Grants: free GPU compute for researchers
The AI field runs on decades of academic work, and as a company that benefits from that work, we believe we should give something back. The Nebius Research Grants program provides researchers with free credits for Nebius GPU Cloud, AI models through Token Factory, and Tavily’s agentic search engine, plus our expertise to accelerate discovery and deployment.
The program is open to postgraduate students, PhD candidates, postdocs, faculty members, and researchers leading computational projects at accredited academic institutions and non-profit research organizations. Grant amounts are determined based on each proposal. Teams from Stanford, the London Institute, and Utrecht University are already part of the program, working on everything from task-in-prompt adversarial attacks on LLMs to CRISPR-GPT, an agent that automates gene-editing experiments. The strongest work is featured on Nebius Science and in joint publications.
Applications run on an academic-year cycle. Proposals for 2026–2027 are open now, with decisions by early Q4 2026. Learn more and apply on the grants page.
Nebius Academy for Business: building the human layer of AI transformation
Many companies adopt AI by buying the tools, running the trainings, and launching the pilots. But the result has been high adoption, low transformation. Around 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable revenue impact. What separates the top 5% is how AI gets put to work, not the models themselves.
The reason is structural. AI transformation isn’t a project with an end date, because each model generation redraws the workflows the last one built. What carries it is people who can redesign their own work as AI evolves. They are the human layer, and that’s what Nebius Academy for Business builds, through a four-stage system.
Teams in tech and finance already train with us, including Banco de Chile, inDrive, Playrix, Vention, Exness, and NaranjaX.
Measure
Everything starts with the AI Readiness Assessment: a verified baseline of AI capability across the organization, by team, function, and role. Business and technical capabilities are scored separately, so every gap and every priority is clear. It also gives teams documented evidence of AI literacy work — the kind the EU AI Act asks employers to support as its provisions phase in.
Build
A structured engagement then closes those gaps with role-based AI training on two tracks. AI for Work serves business teams, with programs for managers, marketers, salespeople, and teachers, plus a change-management program that helps adoption stick. AI for Tech is for developers, data scientists, and engineers, covering AI-assisted programming, agent infrastructure, and end-to-end ML systems built in the same tools teams use at work. The training happens inside real workflows, so change is underway by the time a program ends.
Amplify
We train and certify the client’s own people as AI Champions, who redesign how their functions work and lead the change across their teams, so the organization can extend AI capability without depending on us for every rollout.
Evolve
Because every model generation resets what “competent” means, the last stage keeps measuring after training ends. It runs on Evolve, the Academy’s agentic learning platform, which brings AI coaching into the tools people already use and verifies progress on real tasks rather than simulations. Instead of a certificate of attendance, the organization gets continuous evidence of competence.
Why do we do this
Nebius is known for its full-stack AI cloud platform. The Academy exists because infrastructure alone doesn’t change how a company works; people do. And because each model generation keeps resetting the bar for skills, AI capability isn’t something an organization acquires once — it’s something it maintains, like any other system. That’s the logic behind Nebius Academy, and behind every program in this post.
Whether you’re planning AI training for your company, want to certify your own expertise, or need compute for your research, you can start today at academy.nebius.com.
