Analyst(s): Brendan Burke
Publication Date: February 12, 2026
The acquisition of Tavily by Nebius highlights an ongoing strategic shift from infrastructure provision to a comprehensive platform for agentic AI. By combining high-performance inference with real-time web search capabilities, Nebius addresses a critical bottleneck in deploying autonomous agents that require both reasoning power and factual grounding.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Nebius’ acquisition of Tavily and its strategic rationale
- Integration of real-time search with inference infrastructure
- The role of grounding in enterprise agent adoption
- Competitive positioning against hyperscalers and bare-metal neoclouds
- Market implications for the rapidly growing agentic AI sector
The News: Nebius has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Tavily, a search API provider optimized specifically for AI agents. The acquisition integrates Tavily’s real-time web search capabilities directly into the Nebius AI cloud platform, complementing its existing Token Factory inference service. This combination provides developers with a unified infrastructure for building autonomous agents that can reason efficiently and access up-to-date information without the friction of multi-vendor integration. Tavily currently serves over one million developers and major enterprise clients, including IBM, Cohere, and Groq.
“This acquisition brings the search layer directly into our stack, so developers can focus on their applications instead of managing multiple vendors,” said Roman Chernin, co‑founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius.
Does Nebius’ Acquisition of Tavily Create the Leading Agentic Cloud?
Analyst Take: The news that Nebius acquires Tavily aligns with the maturation of the AI infrastructure market. In 2024 and 2025, the Cloud Wars were fought over who had the most H100s. In 2026, the battleground has shifted up the stack. For developers, this acquisition signals an opportunity to move beyond fragmented LLMOps and consolidate the agentic stack.
Autonomous agents often fail in production not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack context. By bringing a first-party search engine into the cloud boundary, Nebius is attempting to build the leading Agentic Cloud: a platform where the reasoning engine and the context engine share the same backend.
Bridging the Gap Between Reasoning and Reality
The Tavily acquisition move directly addresses the two biggest blockers to enterprise AI adoption: hallucination and stale data. Nebius’ Token Factory provides the compute density required for high-throughput inference, especially for reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 that use Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. However, these models are only as good as their integration with enterprise context and real-world data access. Tavily fills this void by providing the grounding layer of real-time access to web data. For industries like financial services or logistics, where a 10-minute-old fact is already obsolete, this integrated approach is the only way to move agents from experimental chatbots to autonomous employees.
Competing for the Agentic Developer
This acquisition creates a significant software moat for Nebius. While hyperscalers offer search tools, they are often tethered to proprietary ecosystems. Nebius is positioning itself as the open, high-performance alternative for developers who want to use open models without being locked into proprietary models or restrictive, general-purpose platforms.
Against bare-metal GPU providers that compete solely on price per hour, Nebius is now offering a managed service. A developer can rent GPUs anywhere, but building a performant, grounded agent usually requires stitching together five different vendors. By consolidating these, Nebius reduces the time-to-value for startups scaling agentic workflows.
Navigating Security and Execution Risks
The fusion of real-time search and high-speed inference is not without its hurdles. Integration quality is paramount, and real-time search introduces potential latency that could erode the performance gains of Token Factory. Furthermore, as Nebius productizes a first-party search stack, it must maintain its open platform promise to ensure model-agnostic support and easy interoperability with third-party tools.
However, Nebius is uniquely positioned to handle latency and data governance concerns. A critical differentiator here is Nebius’ commitment to security through its Zero Data Retention (ZDR) policy. In an era where enterprises fear their proprietary prompts or retrieved context will be used to train a competitor’s model, Nebius’ ZDR feature ensures that inputs and outputs are never stored or reused. By keeping the search (Tavily) and inference (Token Factory) within the same secure cloud boundary, Nebius provides a controlled environment that meets the auditability requirements of highly regulated sectors.
What to Watch:
- Neocloud Response: Watch for other GPU-centric clouds to launch more aggressive grounding features for their open-model offerings to counter Nebius’ specialized focus.
- The Agent-First Internet: As agents generate more search queries than humans, will search providers face new agent-blocking protocols from web publishers?
- Inference Costs: If Nebius can successfully subsidize search costs through high-volume inference, it could disrupt the current API pricing models of agentic search competitors.
See the complete press release on Nebius’s acquisition of Tavily to accelerate the development of agentic AI applications on the Nebius website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
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Author Information
Brendan is Research Director, Semiconductors, Supply Chain, and Emerging Tech. He advises clients on strategic initiatives and leads the Futurum Semiconductors Practice. He is an experienced tech industry analyst who has guided tech leaders in identifying market opportunities spanning edge processors, generative AI applications, and hyperscale data centers.
Before joining Futurum, Brendan consulted with global AI leaders and served as a Senior Analyst in Emerging Technology Research at PitchBook. At PitchBook, he developed market intelligence tools for AI, highlighted by one of the industry’s most comprehensive AI semiconductor market landscapes encompassing both public and private companies. He has advised Fortune 100 tech giants, growth-stage innovators, global investors, and leading market research firms. Before PitchBook, he led research teams in tech investment banking and market research.
Brendan is based in Seattle, Washington. He has a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Amherst College.
