A non-profit group linked to Stellar co-founder and govt Jed McCaleb intends to supply an AI chip rental service, Reuters reported on Oct. 30.

The startup in query, Voltage Park, has reportedly bought 24,000 Nvidia H100 chips valued at $500 million. The corporate plans to lease these assets out as a cloud service in order that different corporations can work with synthetic intelligence (AI).

Voltage Park will provide each long-term and short-term entry plans and intends to deploy the chips round February 2024, in keeping with Reuters.

The rental entry mannequin is meant to deal with shortages in AI chips. Although exact availability is unclear, corporations, together with Microsoft and OpenAI, have reported shortages, in keeping with one latest CNN report. OpenAI has even thought-about producing its personal AI chips as an answer to the scarcity, different studies point out.

Cloud rental fashions, against this, permit smaller corporations and builders to remotely entry AI chips and pc assets on a short lived foundation.

Voltage Park has ties to Stellar’s Jed McCaleb

Voltage Park has hyperlinks to a notable cryptocurrency determine, Jed McCaleb, co-founder and Chief Architect of the blockchain agency Stellar. McCaleb can be a co-founder of Ripple and a co-founder of the failed early cryptocurrency change Mt. Gox.

Although McCaleb will not be instantly concerned in Voltage Park, the corporate is an entirely owned subsidiary of McCaleb’s non-profit group, Navigation Fund. The guardian group will obtain all of Voltage Park’s earnings, in keeping with present studies.

Voltage Park will not be the one crypto-related agency that’s shifting into AI and chip leases. In September, studies advised that stablecoin agency Tether had entered an settlement with a Bitcoin mining agency referred to as Northern Information to supply cloud entry to AI chips.

Cloud chip leases are in any other case dominated by main tech corporations, corresponding to Nvidia and Google Cloud. It’s unclear whether or not smaller corporations will have the ability to compete.