NBIS
Another brick in the AI-stack wall
Nebius is doing the startup equivalent of upgrading from a bike helmet to a full NASCAR roll cage. The company said the core engineering and research team from Clarifai, led by founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler, is joining Nebius, while Nebius also licensed Clarifai’s inference and compute orchestration technology.
Why that matters
If you’re trying to turn AI infrastructure into a real business, the boring stuff is the moat. Inference, orchestration, and model serving are the plumbing that keep the whole machine humming. Nebius says this deal helps strengthen Token Factory as a full-stack inference platform — which is a very Wall Street way of saying, “we want the stack, not just the stickers.”
The Eigen AI echo
This isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. Nebius just announced the acquisition of Eigen AI, and this Clarifai move looks like another push to bulk up its AI infrastructure muscle. That means more capability, more product depth, and potentially more reasons for customers to stick around once they’re in the ecosystem.
- More talent: Nebius gets a seasoned AI engineering and research crew.
- More tech: the company adds licensing rights to inference and orchestration IP.
- More ambition: Token Factory is being shaped into a bigger, more integrated platform.
Big picture: Nebius is making a loud bet that in AI, owning the infrastructure layer is the real prize — and it’s shopping accordingly.