Regardless of denials by the corporate, Israeli synthetic intelligence firm AI21 Labs appears set to be acquired eventually. The corporate, co-founded by Prof. Amnon Shashua, is in talks to be acquired by Dutch AI cloud supplier Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS), based by Israelis and former Yandex executives Arkady Volozh and Roman Chernin, “The Info” studies.
Nebius was based within the Netherlands however has a significant growth heart within the Alon Towers in Tel Aviv and lots of the senior executives together with founders Volozh and Chernin in addition to COO Ophir Nave and Elena Bunina reside in Israel. AI entrepreneur Dr. Kira Radinsky sits on the corporate’s board of administrators.
Nebius was based after executives at Yandex, the Russian search engine, bought many of the firm’s operations to a bunch of executives near the Kremlin. These executives, most of whom are new immigrants who arrived in Israel after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, used their cloud data acquired at Yandex to ascertain a brand new operation. At present, Nebius is an AI cloud companies supplier, which leases knowledge facilities. One in all its best-known actions in Israel is the operation of the nationwide supercomputer in Modi’in, which is hosted on MegaDC’s knowledge heart in Modi’in.
Nebius at the moment has a market cap of $32 billion, after signing a collection of giant agreements to provide GPU-based knowledge facilities to Meta and Microsoft. The corporate has raised a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from Nvidia, with whom it maintains shut ties. Nebius competes with CoreWeave and Crusoe, which additionally not too long ago started operations in Israel. After signing a $27 billion settlement to supply AI companies to Meta, Nvidia mentioned it might make investments $2 billion in Nebious..
AI21 Labs, regardless of beforehand denying talks on a sale to Nvidia, is in search of an exit after failing to penetrate the market with its language fashions. It has not too long ago been gaining relative success with its AI agent administration product, Maestro. AI21 Labs was given a $1.4 billion price ticket in 2023, and traders within the firm, together with Pitango, Intel Capital, B2 Ventures, Coatue, Google and Nvidia, are estimated to be in search of a premium on the funding and hoping to promote AI21 Labs for a number of billion {dollars}. Nebius shares have risen 49% because the begin of the 12 months and 523% over the previous 12 months, using a wave of funding in AI-related capital tools.
Printed by Globes, Israel enterprise information – en.globes.co.il – on April 9, 2026.
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