Reflection, a two-year-old artificial-intelligence company, has agreed to buy more than $1 billion of computing capacity from the cloud provider Nebius, in a multi-year contract running through 2029 that gives it access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips, Bloomberg reported. It is another example of an AI lab committing to enormous, long-dated hardware spending long before it earns comparable revenue.
The deal
The agreement secures Reflection a guaranteed supply of high-end computing power for years, the raw material needed to train large AI models. It is the company's second big infrastructure commitment in short order: it also signed a multibillion-dollar compute deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX last month, according to TechCrunch. For a startup, contracting for this much capacity is a bet that demand for its models, and its ability to fund the bills, will keep pace.
Who Reflection is
Reflection was founded in 2024 by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, both alumni of Google DeepMind, where Antonoglou worked on the AlphaGo systems that beat human champions at the board game Go. The company builds "open-weight" AI models, whose underlying parameters are shared openly, positioning it as an alternative to the closed systems of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Investors have rerated it quickly. A funding round in late 2025 valued Reflection at about $8 billion, with Nvidia among the backers alongside Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed, and the company has since been reported to be raising more at a valuation near $25 billion. That kind of jump, in months, captures how aggressively capital is chasing frontier AI, and how far valuations now run ahead of profits.
Who Nebius is
Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS) is the international business that spun out of Yandex, the Russian internet company, after Yandex sold its domestic operations in the wake of sanctions tied to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Relaunched as a Western-listed AI cloud provider, Nebius rents out clusters of Nvidia chips to companies that need to train and run AI, and it has become one of the more prominent names in the business, signing large capacity deals with major technology firms.
The Reflection contract added to that momentum. Nebius shares rose on the news, extending a strong run this year for the stock as investors bet on demand for AI computing, Benzinga reported.
Why these deals keep getting bigger
The pattern, an AI lab pre-committing billions to a cloud provider, has become common as advanced Nvidia chips remain scarce and expensive. Guaranteeing supply years out protects a lab from shortages and gives the cloud provider the revenue certainty to fund new capacity. It also concentrates risk: much of the AI build-out rests on the assumption that future demand will justify today's spending. Deals like Reflection's are a wager that it will, and, as with the rest of the AI infrastructure boom, the payoff is still to be proven.
