Reflection inks $1B compute deal with Nebius

Reflection AI, a U.S. startup developing open-source AI models, signed a $1 billion compute deal with European AI infrastructure company Nebius to access Nvidia's latest chips. The deal follows a similar agreement with SpaceX and highlights the race among AI firms to secure computing resources for model training and deployment, amid growing interest in open-weight models due to data retention concerns and government restrictions on closed-source AI.

Reflection AI, a U.S. startup vying to develop open models https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/09/reflection-raises-2b-to-be-americas-open-frontier-ai-lab-challenging-deepseek/ , has signed a $1 billion compute deal with European AI infrastructure company, Nebius. Nebius https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/24/the-curious-case-of-nebius-the-publicly-traded-ai-infrastructure-startup/ , 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 the startup signed a similar deal to access SpaceX’ https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/spacex-inks-compute-deal-with-reflection-ai-an-open-source-ai-lab/ s computing resources, and mirrors several partnerships by AI firms 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 received ample attention lately as debate rages over the value of top-shelf, closed-source AI models — especially with data retention concerns https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/satya-nadella-has-issued-a-shocking-warning-to-companies-using-ai/ surging up, as well as government intervention. Just last month, the Trump administration pressured Anthropic https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/trump-drops-restrictions-on-anthropics-mythos-and-fable-models/ and OpenAI https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/ to restrict their most powerful new models, raising concerns that access to AI models could be taken away overnight https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-leaders-want-american-ai-they-just-dont-want-america-to-be-able-to-turn-it-off/ . That, plus the release of more capable open models from China, has led to 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 https://nebius.com/newsroom/nvidia-and-nebius-partner-to-scale-full-stack-ai-cloud , Nebius signed a five-year infrastructure deal with Meta https://nebius.com/newsroom/nebius-signs-new-ai-infrastructure-agreement-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.