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Nov 1, 2023

New nonprofit backed by crypto billionaire scores AI chips worth $500M

Posted by in categories: blockchains, robotics/AI

It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI.

It was revealed yesterday that Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of blockchain startups Stellar, Ripple and Mt Gox and aerospace company Vast, launched a 501©(3) nonprofit that purchased 24,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to build data centers that’ll lease capacity to AI projects.

Already, the cluster of GPUs — worth an estimated half a billion dollars and among the largest in the world — is being used by startups Imbue and Character.ai for AI model experimentation, claims Eric Park, the CEO of a newly formed organization, Voltage Park, that’s charged with running and managing the data centers.

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