Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS) shares got a nice premarket boost on Friday after the company announced it's buying Eigen AI for about $643 million. The move is all about beefing up Nebius's AI inference capabilities and making its Nebius Token Factory platform even more powerful.

What's the Deal?

The $643 million price tag includes cash and Class A shares, and the deal should close in the next few weeks, assuming antitrust clearance and other usual conditions go smoothly. Nebius had $3.68 billion in cash on hand as of the end of 2025, so they've got plenty of firepower.

Once the acquisition is done, Eigen AI's inference and post-training optimization tech gets baked directly into Nebius Token Factory. That means better autoscaling endpoints and fine-tuning pipelines for major open-source models. Nebius says this will improve performance, throughput, and cost efficiency while making life easier for enterprise AI teams.

The two companies have already been working together, and their jointly optimized versions of some leading open-source models ranked among the fastest on Artificial Analysis. Eigen AI brings expertise across the whole model lifecycle—post-training, fine-tuning, and production inference—for models like GPT-OSS, Gemma, Qwen, Llama, Nemotron, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, and MiniMax.

Team and Expansion

Eigen AI's founding team, which includes researchers from MIT's HAN Lab, will join Nebius and set up an engineering and research office in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's a key part of Nebius's U.S. expansion plans.

Roman Chernin, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius, put it this way: "We are operating in a capacity-scarcity world where AI builders need optimized inference and infrastructure scale. The integration of Eigen AI's optimization capabilities and founding team will establish Nebius Token Factory at the frontier of inference, offering customers market-leading model performance and unit economics with massive compute capacity to back it at scale."

Short Interest Creeps Up

Short interest in Nebius rose from 42.36 million to 43.63 million shares, which is now 20.42% of the float. With average daily volume of 17.35 million shares, it would take about 2.52 days to cover all those short positions. That's a notable level of bearish sentiment, but not extreme.

Technical Picture: Momentum Near Highs

Nebius stock is still hanging out in the upper half of its 52-week range after hitting a 52-week high in April. The longer-term trend is still pointing up, but the stock is digesting that big run. It's trading 1.7% below its 20-day simple moving average (SMA) but 33% above its 100-day SMA—a classic sign of short-term cooling while the intermediate uptrend stays intact.

The moving average convergence divergence (MACD) is below its signal line, and the histogram is negative. That suggests fading upside momentum compared to earlier in the move. In plain English, buyers aren't as aggressive as they were during the prior push.

Over the last 12 months, the stock is up a staggering 477.76%. That kind of powerful re-rating can also bring sharper pullbacks when momentum pauses, so the chart is now more sensitive to "good vs. great" expectations near prior highs.

• Key Resistance: $168.50 — near the prior peak area where rallies have recently stalled.
• Key Support: $141.00 — near the 20-day EMA zone that often acts like a short-term trend check.

Earnings and Analyst Outlook

Mark your calendars: Nebius reports earnings on May 13, 2026. Here's what the Street is expecting:

• EPS Estimate: Loss of 73 cents (wider than the loss of 39 cents a year ago)
• Revenue Estimate: $374.23 million (up from $55.30 million a year ago)
• Valuation: P/E of 1206.0x — yes, that's a premium valuation relative to peers

Analysts are still bullish overall, with a Buy rating and an average price target of $165.30. Recent analyst moves include:

• Wolfe Research: Initiated with Peer Perform (April 16)
• Cantor Fitzgerald: Initiated with Overweight, target $129.00 (April 9)
• B of A Securities: Initiated with Buy, target $150.00 (March 24)

As of Friday's premarket, Nebius shares were up 2.97% at $142.33.