Nebius, the AI cloud company listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS, has announced an agreement to acquire Eigen AI, a leading inference and model optimization company, for approximately $643 million in a combination of cash and Nebius Class A shares. The transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks, subject to antitrust clearance and customary conditions.
The acquisition will integrate Eigen AI’s full-stack optimization capabilities directly into Nebius Token Factory, the company’s managed inference platform for production AI. The two companies have already delivered jointly optimized implementations of leading open-source models that ranked among the fastest on Artificial Analysis. Eigen AI’s founding team will also establish Nebius’s Bay Area engineering and research presence in San Francisco.
Eigen AI was co-founded by Ryan Hanrui Wang and Wei-Chen Wang, both alumni of MIT’s HAN Lab. Ryan’s Sparse Attention work is the most-cited HPCA paper since 2020, while Wei-Chen received the MLSys 2024 Best Paper Award for Activation-aware Weight Quantization, now the standard for 4-bit model serving in production deployments. Co-founder Di Jin, an MIT CSAIL PhD, contributed to Meta’s Llama 3 and Llama 4 post-training. The optimization techniques the team has developed address the complexity of running inference efficiently across newer architectures including Mixture-of-Experts, reasoning, and long-context models.
KEY QUOTES:
“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, Nebius
“We’re proud to join Nebius and work alongside the Token Factory team to push the boundaries of inference performance. Nebius has built a world-class AI cloud with a deep engineering culture that perfectly aligns with our own. 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
