Reflection AI, a U.S. startup working on open models, has signed a $1 billion compute deal with Nebius, a European AI infrastructure company. Nebius, formerly the international arm of Russian tech giant Yandex, will provide Reflection access to Nvidia’s latest chips. The deal follows a similar agreement with SpaceX and reflects a broader trend of AI firms securing compute resources for model training and deployment.
The partnership comes amid growing concerns over data retention and government intervention in AI development. Last month, the Trump administration pressured Anthropic and OpenAI to restrict their most powerful models, raising fears about potential sudden access restrictions. Additionally, the release of more capable open models from China has boosted mainstream interest in open-source AI. Reflection, currently valued at $8 billion, was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers and has raised nearly $2.6 billion in funding from investors including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Nebius has also signed a five-year infrastructure deal with Meta worth up to $27 billion and a multi-year deal with Microsoft worth up to $19.4 billion. TechCrunch has reached out to Reflection and Nebius for more information. Source: techcrunch
