Nebius backs Europe’s AI builders with $10M in compute, capital, and community programs
Nebius backs Europe’s AI builders with $10M in compute, capital, and community programs
Alongside Accel, NVIDIA, and a network of European VCs, the Nebius initiative supports developers building and deploying the open, independent AI ecosystem in Europe, from first project to scale-up.
Following last month’s global launch, we’re expanding support for AI builders across Europe with more compute grants, founder funding opportunities, and hands-on community programs that bring developers together to build, experiment, and share their work.
Europe produces about a fifth of the world’s AI research, and its builders have created some of the most widely used open models and tools. As a European-headquartered company, we’re committing to supporting the continent’s AI future by bringing together European investors and local builder communities to help more projects take root and grow here.
Compute to build
We will provide compute grants for projects advancing the open-source frontier through research and developer tooling. We’re looking for work created in Europe that helps other builders own their intelligence and makes the open stack stronger for everyone. Projects could include:
- Open models and open-weight research
- Harnesses, coding agents, and agent runtimes
- Inference, serving, and infrastructure tooling
- Post-training, reinforcement learning, evaluation, and data tooling
Capital to grow
Through Accel and a broader network of European VC firms, the program will connect teams building on open source with potential investors, helping founders explore funding opportunities as they turn their projects into companies.
Matt Weigand, Partner at Accel, comments, “We are glad to join the Nebius AI Builder Program and NVIDIA in supporting European AI. Doing so builds on our belief that open source plays a critical role in the AI ecosystem. The Nebius AI Builder Program also presents us with the opportunity to increase our portfolio of European founders building from first project to scale-up. This year, Accel has invested in several founders building global open-source-rooted developer and AI infrastructure companies, and we look forward to discovering and investing in the best of European open-source AI.”
Communities to build with
Nebius and NVIDIA will collaborate on hackathons and demo days with communities such as AI Tinkerers, {Tech: Europe} and ESRA (European Student Robotics Association). These are places where builders meet, explore ideas, and start building their projects.
Joe Heitzeberg, Founder, AI Tinkerers, explains: “Europe’s AI ecosystem is full of builders turning new capabilities into working systems. In the agentic economy, those builders have what we call a ‘10,000x vote’: their choices of models, tools, and infrastructure carry through the agents they deploy and the work others build on. At AI Tinkerers, we see that influence grow when builders share code, demos, and lessons with one another. We’re excited to partner with Nebius to put more resources behind Europe’s builder communities and help their breakthroughs reach the world.”
Building on momentum
We launched the Nebius AI Builder Program in September to give more builders the resources, freedom, and open ecosystem to turn their ideas into working AI systems.
“Developers across Europe are building open models and tools that people around the world use. We want more of those projects to grow into lasting companies here in Europe, ” says Waqas Makhdum, VP of Developer Relations and Community at Nebius. “That means giving builders access to compute, helping them scale their projects, and supporting local communities where they can meet collaborators and get their ideas working.”
Within weeks, thousands applied to join, and the Nebius × NVIDIA Global AI Hackathon already has more than 24,000 participants. Through Builders & Brews, we also brought build days to 20 cities worldwide, with speakers from companies including n8n, Lovable, Nous Research, Replit, and LangChain.
If you’re building AI in Europe, we’d love to see what you’re working on. Join us and take your project further.
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See also
Today we’re launching the Nebius AI Builder Program: one place to build and scale AI systems on open models and independent tools, with no lock-in to a single vendor. Members get $400+ in credits and discounts across the stack, cookbooks with working code, free courses from Nebius Academy and NVIDIA DLI, certifications, expert office hours, and a community of builders.
SemiAnalysis has named Nebius a Platinum AI cloud provider, the top tier of its ClusterMAX™ 3.0 rating. The rating is based on live testing of production clusters: burn-ins, storage under concurrent load, and automated failure recovery on real NVIDIA GB300 and NVIDIA HGX B300 hardware. This post covers what the testing found and why it matters for teams choosing where to run production AI.
Nebius Academy and NVIDIA are launching an education collaboration at GTC Berlin, featuring: NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) open-source courses hosted on Nebius Academy starting with Fundamentals of Deep Learning, co-developed courses in agentic and physical AI that run on Nebius, and Nebius GPU compute behind NVIDIA DLI’s sold-out full-day workshop at GTC.