TL;DRNebius, the Dutch neocloud that split from Yandex in 2024, agreed to acquire Eigen AI for $643 million, valuing the 20-person MIT-alumni startup at roughly $32 million per employee. Eigen’s inference optimisation technology maximises tokens per Nvidia GPU, the most valuable capability in AI infrastructure. The deal strengthens Nebius’s Token Factory inference platform as the neocloud market expands rapidly with CoreWeave and FluidStack raising billions.
Nebius Group, the Dutch cloud computing company that split from Russian internet provider Yandex in 2024, has agreed to acquire Eigen AI for approximately $643 million in stock and cash. The deal, announced on 1 May, is for a 20-person startup founded by alumni of MIT’s HAN Lab. In a market where the largest AI companies are valued in the hundreds of billions and the most prominent acquisitions involve thousands of engineers, $643 million for 20 people requires explanation. The explanation is inference. Eigen AI’s technology maximises the number of tokens, the basic units of data in large language models, that each Nvidia chip can generate when running AI models. “This is like the Olympic sport of the current market: who can extract more tokens for the same price?” said Roman Chernin, Nebius co-founder and chief business officer. The Eigen team members, he said, are “like Olympic runners in this discipline.” The discipline, it turns out, is worth $32 million per person.
