Reflection signs $1 billion compute deal with Nebius

Reflection AI, a U.S. startup building open models, has signed a $1 billion compute deal with European AI infrastructure company Nebius. Nebius — formerly the international arm of Russian tech giant Yandex — will provide Reflection access to Nvidia’s latest chips. The deal comes just a few weeks after Reflection signed a similar deal for access to SpaceX’s computing resources, and mirrors several partnerships that AI firms have struck as they race to secure compute for training and deploying their models.

Along with its increasingly capable Chinese counterparts, Reflection is one of several open-weight AI model developers that have drawn significant attention lately, amid debate over the value of top-shelf, closed-source AI models — a debate sharpened by surging data-retention concerns and government intervention. Just last month, the Trump administration pressured Anthropic and OpenAI to restrict their most powerful new models, raising concerns that access to AI models could be taken away overnight. That, combined with the release of more capable open models from China, has driven an increase in mainstream interest in open-source AI.

Reflection, currently valued at $8 billion, was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers. It has already raised close to $2.6 billion in funding from backers including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Shortly after securing a $2 billion investment from Nvidia, Nebius signed a five-year infrastructure deal with Meta worth up to $27 billion. Last year, Nebius signed a multi-year deal with Microsoft worth up to $19.4 billion.

TechCrunch has reached out to Reflection and Nebius for more information.

Why it matters

The deal underscores how heavily open-model developers now depend on multibillion-dollar compute partnerships to compete, at a moment when government pressure on closed-source AI labs is fueling wider interest in open alternatives.