Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure firm Nebius said on Friday it had agreed to acquire inference and optimization startup Eigen AI in a deal valued at about $643 million, strengthening its push into production-grade artificial intelligence and expanding its United States footprint.
Shares of the company jumped about 10% in early trading.
* The deal will bolster Nebius’ Token Factory platform, a managed inference service designed to help companies deploy and customize open-source AI models in production
* This comes as inference, the process of running trained AI models in applications, emerges as the fastest-growing segment of the AI market, forecast to account for roughly two-thirds of total compute demand this year, according to Deloitte
* The deal, which is expected to close in the coming weeks, will be paid in cash and Nebius Class A shares, based on the company’s 30-day weighted average share price
* Nebius said Eigen AI’s inference and post-training optimization technology would be integrated directly into Token Factory
* The companies have already worked together on optimized versions of leading open-source models
* Nebius has been expanding rapidly by securing large, long-term AI infrastructure contracts from major technology companies, including Meta, which agreed in March to buy up to $27 billion worth of computing capacity from the firm over five years
* Eigen AI, founded by former MIT researchers, focuses on optimizing models from post-training through production inference, helping companies extract higher performance
Source: Economic Times