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Bloomberg) -- Cloud computing provider Nebius Group NV agreed to buy Eigen AI, a startup that boosts the performance of chips used to run artificial intelligence tasks, for about $615 million in stock and cash.

Eigen, a 20-person California startup cofounded by two alumni of a prominent MIT AI lab, works on optimizing the performance of some of the leading open-source models from OpenAI, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Meta Platforms Inc. and Nvidia Corp. Eigen’s technology maximizes the number of tokens — the basic units of data in large language models — generated by each Nvidia chip that Nebius uses for inference, or running AI models, said Roman Chernin, Nebius co-founder and chief business officer. That helps Nebius provide better and cheaper services to customers. 

“This is like the Olympic sport of the current market: Who can extract more tokens for the same price?” he said in an interview. The Eigen team members are “like Olympic runners in this discipline, which for us is a significant improvement in our inference business.” 

Nebius, which split from Russian internet provider Yandex in 2024, is among a group of firms called “neoclouds,” which rent AI computing capacity to companies like Microsoft Corp. In November, Amsterdam-based Nebius unveiled a product called Token Factory for running inference tasks, competing with startups like Fireworks and Baseten, as well as the cloud giants.

Right now, with data center capacity in short supply, Nebius is reserving some of its computing power for Token Factory rather than selling it ahead of time to large clients in multiyear deals, Chernin said. It can charge higher prices for these kinds of short-notice contracts, he said, plus it’s critical for Nebius to add more and different services. The company’s goal is to become one of the key players in the inference market in the next 18 months, he said.

The acquisition is Nebius’ second in the past three months, after a February deal to buy Tavily, and the company is looking at other deal opportunities, Chernin said, declining to specify targets. In general, Nebius wants to purchase companies with teams or capabilities that speed its planned strategy or add products and features that are closer to direct usage by customers. 

“We don’t want to be the infrastructure and someone above us works with the real customers,” he said.