Nebius (NBIS.US) launches an open-source model execution platform to challenge Microsoft Corporation and Amazon.com, Inc. in cloud services.

Artificial intelligence cloud service provider Nebius (NBIS.US) is launching a new product aimed at providing access to open source models and the computing power necessary to run these models - this is one of their initiatives to further expand their market share in the field of artificial intelligence. This product, called "Token Factory," focuses on inference workloads, which is the process of running developed artificial intelligence models and applications. The service allows customers to choose from a range of leading open source models, including OpenAI's GPT-oss, Meta's Llama, and DeepSeek, and provides secure computing power to run the applications they build. Token Factory competes with cloud computing products from Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) and Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US). Microsoft Corporation recently reached an agreement with Nebius to obtain artificial intelligence computing power worth up to $19.4 billion. Startups like Fireworks and Baseten also offer similar services. Nebius, based in the Netherlands, was spun off from the Russian internet company Yandex last year and has since become a well-known provider of "new cloud services." The company sells artificial intelligence cloud service resources from data centers in the United States, Europe, and Israel. In Israel, it also has one of the country's first publicly available clusters of NVIDIA Corporation's latest generation of artificial intelligence chips. For artificial intelligence infrastructure providers like Nebius, selling software services on top of their cloud services can bring in more profits. However, Nebius co-founder and CEO Roman Chernin says that his company values being able to attract more customers with a richer product line rather than potential profit growth. Chernin said in an interview, "Just having infrastructure is not enough. We want to be a big enterprise, but we don't want to be just a utility company." Chernin sees an opportunity in catering to the rapidly growing artificial intelligence market. Some AI developers are reconsidering how much they rely on the most powerful models from top AI labs, which are mostly closed-source or proprietary. He says that developing software based on these closed systems may limit flexibility for fine-tuning and increase costs. "They're starting to move away from building everything within a closed ecosystem to adopting a more diversified product portfolio. What we're building is a scalable and reliable platform that allows customers to easily switch from the solutions they initially used to the scaled-up solutions they need," Chernin said. Nebius stated that early customers of Token Factory include Amsterdam tech company Prosus and artificial intelligence video platform Higgsfield. HuggingFace is also using Nebius infrastructure for inference and is collaborating with the company to showcase Token Factory in its inference service marketplace.