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Nebius vs Wafer
A scaled European cloud measured among the top hosts on throughput against a young company whose agents tune inference stacks per workload.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Nebius vs Wafer: key differences
Wafer's pitch is that most hosts run stock vLLM or SGLang, and its agents can do better. They profile a workload, test configs across batching, quantization, engines, kernels and hardware, and deploy the winner, then keep re-tuning as traffic changes on NVIDIA or AMD. Wafer reports its tuned Qwen 3.5 397B at 2.8x stock SGLang and GLM 5.1 and DeepSeek V4 Pro each 2x a vLLM baseline. Those are self-reported against untuned baselines. Nebius is a larger, established cloud that Artificial Analysis has independently measured among the top hosts on throughput, with speculative decoding on dedicated endpoints.
The two also package access differently. Wafer Pass is a flat-rate subscription from $10 a week covering every hosted model, aimed at Claude Code, Cline and OpenHands users. Nebius bills per token from $0.06 per million input and adds GPU rental and EU or US placement. Wafer is very young with a small hosted catalog, so Nebius is the safer bet for breadth, residency and scale. Wafer is worth testing for a strict latency SLO on a big open model when no one in-house tunes kernels.
What Nebius and Wafer 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 V3, GPT-OSS
Full Nebius profileWafer
Wafer builds AI agents that act as GPU performance engineers, then sells inference on the stacks those agents tune. The company came out of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch as a "Cursor for CUDA" that turned slow PyTorch into custom kernels. Founders Emilio Andere and Steven Arellano are based in San Francisco. Its agents profile a workload, generate candidate configs across batching, decoding, quantization, engines, kernels and hardware, measure each one and deploy the winner.
Example models: Qwen 3.5 397B Turbo, GLM 5.1 Turbo
Full Wafer profileShould you choose Nebius or Wafer?
Nebius
Choose Nebius for
- Independently measured throughput across a 60+ model catalog
- EU residency and a 99.9% dedicated-endpoint SLA
- Moving from tokens into GPU training on one account
Wafer
Choose Wafer for
- Flat-rate weekly access for agentic coding harnesses
- Dedicated endpoints re-tuned continuously for a strict latency SLO
- Teams hedging GPU supply across NVIDIA and AMD
Nebius vs Wafer at a glance
| Attribute | Nebius | Wafer |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights, 60+ models | Open weights |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, GPT-OSS | Qwen 3.5 397B Turbo, GLM 5.1 Turbo |
| Speed | Among top hosts on throughput | 2–2.8x vs stock vLLM or SGLang |
| Price | From $0.06 per 1M input | Wafer Pass from $10 a week |
| Customization | Serve uploaded fine-tunes | Agent-tuned dedicated deployments |
| Deployment | Token Factory, dedicated, raw GPUs | Serverless pass, dedicated |
| Long context | Varies by model | Varies by model |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Nebius and Wafer?
A scaled European cloud measured among the top hosts on throughput against a young company whose agents tune inference stacks per workload.
When should I choose Nebius over Wafer?
Independently measured throughput across a 60+ model catalog; EU residency and a 99.9% dedicated-endpoint SLA; Moving from tokens into GPU training on one account.
When should I choose Wafer over Nebius?
Flat-rate weekly access for agentic coding harnesses; Dedicated endpoints re-tuned continuously for a strict latency SLO; Teams hedging GPU supply across NVIDIA and AMD.
Is Nebius or Wafer cheaper?
Nebius: From $0.06 per 1M input. Wafer: Wafer Pass from $10 a week. The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, Nebius or Wafer?
Nebius: Varies by model. Wafer: Varies by model.
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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.