Russian internet company Yandex (YNDX.O) is gearing up plans to expand its cloud services outside the country with the deployment of data centres in Germany.

The initial capital commitment is set to reach US$30 million and the first servers are expected to come online in 2022.

The project is set to bring Yandex.Cloud services into a burgeoning market and marks one of the main major moves by a Russian operator to establish such footprint in the heart of the European Union.

Oleg Koverznev, COO of Yandex.Cloud, said: “This is a very important step. We realise that we cannot be a significant global player on the cloud platform market by operating only in Russia.”

The company is for now not planning to build any infrastructure in Germany and will be “using commercial platforms” across three sites from an unmanned commercial data centre operator. Initial take up is set at 864 servers.

Yandex has also begun training staff and setting up an office in Germany to run the new cloud region.

Koverznev added that around 40 of the 12,400 clients the business serves have shown an interest in deploying with Yandex in a German cloud region. Yandex.Cloud’s 2021 revenue tripled to nearly 3 billion roubles (US$41 million) whilst the overall Yandex group revenues are set at 330 and 340 billion roubles ($4.53 billion-$4.67 billion).