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Nebius vs Dolphin
Nebius is an established European AI cloud with SLAs. Dolphin is a new decentralized network that serves one model very cheaply on consumer GPUs.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Nebius vs Dolphin: key differences
Nebius serves 60+ open models from $0.06 per million input tokens, with dedicated endpoints on a 99.9% SLA, EU or US placement, uploaded fine-tunes and raw GPUs, backed by capacity deals with Microsoft and Meta. Dolphin launched its API in October 2026 with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at $0.01 in and $0.07 out. Nodes are idle consumer GPUs paid in $POD tokens, and validators check logprobs so nodes cannot swap in a smaller model. It publishes no speed, context or SLA, and signup runs through a crypto wallet and Telegram.
Nebius is the pick for production traffic, compliance and model choice. Dolphin is far cheaper on its one model and hosts uncensored models mainstream clouds will not, but its latency and uptime are less predictable and its signup will not clear most procurement teams.
What Nebius and Dolphin do
Nebius
Nebius is an Amsterdam-headquartered AI cloud and the strongest European alternative to the US hyperscalers. It sells raw NVIDIA GPU compute, from H100s at $2.15 an hour preemptible up to GB300 NVL72 racks, and it has begun adding Vera Rubin. Hyperscale buyers back it: a Microsoft capacity deal worth about $17.4B in September 2025, then a Meta agreement worth up to about $27B in March 2026.
Example models: DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, MiniMax M3
Full Nebius profile
Dolphin
Dolphin began in 2023 as Eric Hartford's series of open-source, uncensored fine-tunes, trained to drop the refusals and baked-in guidelines of their base models so that the developer sets the rules through the system prompt. Current releases include Dolphin Llama 3.1 8B and Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition, built with Venice, and the project publishes nearly 100 models on Hugging Face. It also runs a chat app, a Telegram bot and a synthetic data service that generates answers to commonly refused prompts.
Example models: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B
Full Dolphin profileShould you choose Nebius or Dolphin?
Nebius vs Dolphin at a glance
| Attribute | Nebius |  Dolphin |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights, 60+ models | Open weights, uncensored fine-tunes |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, MiniMax M3, GLM | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B |
| Speed | Among top hosts on throughput | Unknown |
| Price | From $0.06 per 1M input | $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
| Customization | Serve uploaded fine-tunes | Own uncensored fine-tunes |
| Deployment | Token Factory, dedicated, raw GPUs | Decentralized serverless API |
| Long context | Varies by model | Unknown |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Nebius and Dolphin?
Nebius is an established European AI cloud with SLAs. Dolphin is a new decentralized network that serves one model very cheaply on consumer GPUs.
When should I choose Nebius over Dolphin?
Production endpoints with a 99.9% SLA; EU data residency; A wide open-model catalog plus GPUs.
When should I choose Dolphin over Nebius?
Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls; Models without vendor-imposed refusals; Latency-tolerant background jobs.
Is Nebius or Dolphin cheaper?
Nebius: From $0.06 per 1M input. Dolphin: $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
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If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious. Our inference stack treats a long-horizon trace as the primary workload, so speed, cost, and accuracy hold up deep into the trace.