Nebius to buy Eigen AI for $643 million to boost inference and US expansion

May 1 (Reuters) - 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.

• 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 META.O, 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