Nebius to Acquire Eigen AI for $643M

Nebius Group N.V., an Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider, announced on Thursday an agreement to acquire U.S. startup Eigen AI for approximately $643 million in cash and stock, sending its shares up 11.8 percent during midday trading on Friday.

The stock, listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS, reached a high of $156.00 and last traded at $154.49, up from the previous close of $138.23. Trading volume surged to 15.7 million shares, slightly above the average daily volume of 15.3 million. The deal aims to integrate Eigen AI's model optimization technology into Nebius's Token Factory platform, a managed inference service that helps developers deploy and scale open-source AI models. Eigen specializes in techniques like activation-aware weight quantization, which compresses models to run faster and cheaper on Nvidia GPUs, increasing tokens generated per chip without significant quality loss.

Eigen AI, founded by alumni of MIT's HAN Lab including cofounders Ryan Hanrui Wang and WeiChen Wang, employs about 20 people. Its technology has produced some of the fastest model implementations on benchmarks like Artificial Analysis. Following the close, expected in coming weeks pending...