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Reflection Signs $1 Billion Compute Deal With Nebius for Open Source Models
The Brooklyn startup also maintains a separate $150 million monthly agreement with SpaceX through 2029. It plans to release its first open source model later in 2026 after beginning training last October.
Jul 19, 2:00 AM·1m read1 source
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Reflection announced on July 15, 2026, a $1 billion agreement to purchase compute capacity from Nebius to train its open source AI models, @Forbes reported. The deal follows an existing pact under which the company pays SpaceX $150 million per month through 2029 for capacity at the Colossus data center.
Cofounder and CTO Ioannis Antonoglou said the company plans to release its open source model later this year.
Reflection began training its models in October 2025 after initially focusing on research. The startup was cofounded in March 2024 by Antonoglou and Misha Laskin, both formerly of Google DeepMind, and is headquartered in Brooklyn. The company started by building AI coding agents that improve through reinforcement learning.
It has expanded rapidly, growing from 30 employees in September 2025 to 230 employees as of July 2026. “We are flying the plane as we’re building it,” Antonoglou said. Antonoglou stated the company’s aim is to ensure a competitive frontier open lab in the Western world.
“We want to have a flourishing open ecosystem, and we want to contribute to it,” he said. Chinese authorities are reportedly in talks to potentially curb overseas access to the country’s leading AI models.
