Elastic Shares Surge 8% After Hours On Jina AI Acquisition, New Inference Service Launch, $500 Million Buyback - Elastic (NYSE:ESTC)

Core Insights - Elastic NV's stock surged by 8% in after-hours trading following significant announcements, rising to $88.07 from $81.55 [1] Group 1: Acquisition of Jina AI - Elastic has completed the acquisition of Jina AI, a company specializing in open-source tools for handling diverse data types and languages [2] - This acquisition enhances Elastic's capabilities in vector search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and context engineering for agentic AI, incorporating dense vector models for text and image processing [3] - The former CEO of Jina AI, Han Xiao, has joined Elastic as vice-president of AI, emphasizing the importance of search in generative AI [4] Group 2: Introduction of GPU-Accelerated Inference Service - Elastic launched the Elastic Inference Service (EIS), utilizing NVIDIA GPUs to achieve up to 10x faster data processing compared to CPU-based options [5] - The EIS offers an API-based inference service and features consumption-based pricing per million tokens, available on Serverless and Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments [6] Group 3: Stock Buyback Program - The board of Elastic has authorized a share repurchase program of up to $500 million with no expiration date, reflecting management's confidence in the company's business strength [7] - Over the past year, Elastic's stock has increased by 2.10%, although it has decreased by 17.69% in 2025, with a market capitalization of $8.67 billion [7]