Amsterdam-based AI cloud company Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS) has closed its acquisition of Eigen AI, the inference and model optimization startup founded by alumni of MIT's HAN Lab, in a cash-and-stock deal valued at approximately $643 million at signing.
A 20-Person Team With Outsized Leverage
Announced on May 1 and completed on June 10 following regulatory approvals, the deal consists of up to $98 million in cash plus 3.8 million Nebius Class A shares, with vesting terms designed to retain Eigen AI's key personnel. That is a striking price for a roughly 20-person company — a bet that inference optimization has become one of the most valuable layers of the AI infrastructure stack. Eigen AI, co-founded by MIT HAN Lab researchers Hanrui Wang and Wei-Chen Wang, claims up to 10x cost reductions through full-stack optimization spanning model compression, fine-tuning and inference serving.
Inside Nebius Token Factory
Eigen AI's optimization layers are being integrated directly into Nebius Token Factory, the company's managed inference platform, which provides autoscaling endpoints and fine-tuning pipelines across major open-source models including Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen and Gemma. Eigen's technology maximizes the number of tokens each NVIDIA GPU can generate, squeezing more revenue out of the same silicon — the core economics behind the deal.
A US Beachhead
The acquisition also marks Nebius's expansion into the United States: Eigen AI's founding researchers are establishing an engineering and research hub for Nebius in the San Francisco Bay Area. The move lands amid an intense scramble for AI compute efficiency, as neoclouds like Together AI, which just raised $800M at an $8.3B valuation, race to differentiate on cost per token rather than raw GPU counts.
The deal extends a wave of consolidation across the AI and robotics stack, from Symbotic's purchase of ARMS Innovations to infrastructure plays like Raja Koduri's Oxmiq and Sail Research's $80M raise to cut AI agent compute costs. For Nebius, which reported closing the deal alongside the opening of three new UK data centers, the message is consistent: own every layer that turns electricity into tokens.
Reporting based on coverage from Nebius Newsroom, Techzine and Yahoo Finance.