Resources // LLM Tokens

Nebius for Startups

New

Offer $5,000 credits to start

Suits for Non-VC-backedVC-backedResearchers

Updated Jun 2026

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The offer

$5,000 in introductory AI credits on approved account activation, usable immediately (roughly 1,600 H100-equivalent GPU-hours, or on Token Factory inference)
Up to $100,000 in discounts on a 6-month-plus reserved contract, matched at 50% of qualifying committed spend
Credits and discounts span both Nebius AI Cloud (training and large workloads) and Token Factory (fast, cost-efficient inference on 60+ open models)
Token Factory itself gives any new user a small free credit to test models in the Playground / API, no application
Inference perks: sub-second time-to-first-token, a 99.9% SLA, zero-retention mode, and SOC 2 / HIPAA / ISO 27001
Note: "Nebius AI Studio" has been renamed "Nebius Token Factory"; the old studio.nebius.ai URLs now redirect

Who qualifies

Building or scaling an AI-enabled product
Officially incorporated and less than 10 years old
A working company website, applying from a company email
Excluded: consulting / outsourcing firms, resellers, cloud providers, crypto-only businesses, and public companies
Reviewed by Nebius (selective; they aim to respond within ~2 weeks)

Community Insights

Nebius is well-regarded as a serious, EU-based AI infrastructure player spun out of Yandex, with credible engineering and a minority stake in ClickHouse. For inference specifically it is cited as a legitimate, benchmark-backed option and is one of Hugging Face’s serverless inference providers. The main caution across the GPU-cloud market is variable pricing and availability, so the $5,000 credit plus the reserved-contract discount is the lever to lock in predictable cost. The single most important freshness fact: “AI Studio” is now “Token Factory,” so any older reference to the AI Studio name is stale.

Best Practices (from community tips)

Validate on the no-application Token Factory free credit first, then apply for the $5,000 startup credit for real volume.
Pick the right product for credits: Token Factory (per-token inference) for serving, AI Cloud (GPU-hours) for training and fine-tuning; credits work on both.
Treat the $100,000 as a discount, not free money. It is matched 50% to your committed spend on a 6-month-plus reserved contract, so it only helps once you have predictable production traffic.
Apply with a company email and a live website. Consulting, reseller, crypto-only, and public companies are explicitly rejected.
Choose the Fast vs Base flavor per workload (Fast for interactive agents, Base for batch) to stretch credits. Same API, instant switch.
Enable zero-retention mode for regulated or sensitive data; it is a stated feature.