Reflection signs $1B Nebius compute deal

Reflection AI, a U.S. startup building open models, has signed a $1 billion compute deal with European AI infrastructure company Nebius.

Nebius — a company spun out of Russian tech giant Yandex — will give Reflection access to Nvidia’s latest chips. The agreement arrives just a few weeks after Reflection signed a similar deal for access to SpaceX’s computing resources, underscoring how aggressively AI companies are locking down compute for training and deployment.

Reflection has drawn attention as one of a number of open-weight AI model developers gaining momentum alongside increasingly capable Chinese rivals. Interest in open models has grown as the debate over high-end closed-source systems has intensified, particularly around data retention concerns and government pressure on access.

According to the source, the Trump administration pressured Anthropic and OpenAI just last month to restrict their most powerful new models, fueling fears that access to frontier AI systems could disappear overnight. Combined with the release of stronger open models from China, that has helped push mainstream interest toward open source AI.

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Reflection, which is currently valued at $25 billion pre-money, was founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers. The company has already raised close to $2.6 billion from backers including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Nebius has been signing major infrastructure deals of its own. Shortly after securing a $2 billion investment from Nvidia, it signed a five-year infrastructure deal with Meta worth up to $27 billion. Last year, Nebius also signed a multi-year deal with Microsoft worth up to $19.4 billion.

TechCrunch said it has reached out to Reflection and Nebius for more information. The publication also noted that a previous version of the story misstated Reflection’s last known valuation.