Nebius to Acquire Eigen AI for $643M, Eyes AI Infrastructure Growth

Nebius Group agrees to buy inference startup Eigen AI for $643M, integrating MIT HAN Lab research talent into its Token Factory managed inference platform.

Nebius Group, the Amsterdam-based AI cloud company, announced Friday it has agreed to acquire Eigen AI, a 20-person inference and model optimization startup, in a deal valued at approximately $643 million in cash and Class A shares.

The acquisition, announced May 1, 2026, is expected to close within weeks, pending customary regulatory conditions, including antitrust clearance. Upon closing, Eigen AI’s full optimization stack will be integrated directly into Nebius Token Factory, the company’s flagship managed inference platform.

Inference the process of running trained AI models to generate outputs has emerged as the fastest-growing segment of the AI industry. According to Deloitte, it is forecast to account for roughly two-thirds of total compute demand in 2026. As more AI workloads shift from experimentation into production, the efficiency of inference infrastructure has, consequently, become a critical competitive differentiator.

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Eigen AI’s co-founders Ryan Hanrui Wang and Wei-Chen Wang are alumni of MIT’s HAN Lab, a leading research group focused on AI computing and model efficiency. Ryan’s work on Sparse Attention is, notably, the most-cited paper at HPCA since 2020. Wei-Chen, meanwhile, received the MLSys 2024 Best Paper Award for Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ), which has since become the industry standard for 4-bit model serving in production deployments.

The third co-founder, Di Jin, holds a Ph.D. from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and contributed to post-training for Meta’s Llama 3 and Llama 4 models.

Following the close, Eigen AI’s inference and post-training optimization layers will be woven directly into Nebius Token Factory. The platform currently provides enterprise-grade autoscaling endpoints and fine-tuning pipelines across all major open-source models, including Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, and others.

We are operating in a capacity-scarcity world where AI builders need optimized inference and infrastructure scale. The integration of Eigen AI’s optimization capabilities and founding team will establish Nebius Token Factory at the frontier of inference, offering customers market-leading model performance and unit economics with massive compute capacity to back it at scale.
Roman Chernin, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius.

Notably, the two companies had already collaborated before the deal. Their jointly optimized model implementations ranked among the fastest benchmarks on Artificial Analysis, an independent AI performance evaluation platform.

Beyond the technical integration, the acquisition also serves a geographic purpose. Eigen AI’s founding team will relocate to establish a new Nebius engineering and research hub in the San Francisco Bay Area marking the company’s first dedicated U.S. research presence.

We’re proud to join Nebius and work alongside the Token Factory team to push the boundaries of inference performance. Together, we are removing the friction of AI model customization and deployment so developers can run models reliably in production without managing the underlying infrastructure.
Ryan Hanrui Wang, Co-founder and CEO, Eigen AI.

This is, in fact, Nebius’s second acquisition in three months. In February 2026, the company acquired Tavily, an agentic search startup, for $275 million. Together, the two deals reflect a deliberate pattern: acquiring small, technically elite teams whose capabilities would otherwise take years to build internally.

Nebius itself has grown rapidly since its founding. The company inked a $17.4 billion GPU infrastructure deal with Microsoft, a $27 billion agreement with Meta, secured a $2 billion investment from Nvidia, and raised $4.3 billion in convertible notes to fund data center expansion.

The $643 million consideration will be paid through a combination of cash up to $98 million and approximately 3.8 million Nebius Class A shares, priced based on the company’s 30-day weighted average stock price as of the signing date, subject to adjustments.

Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not verified it independently.

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