Jed McCaleb-backed nonprofit will provide easier access to AI computing capacity

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Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb’s nonprofit Navigation Fund helps to sort out the AI chip scarcity by providing leasable capacity giant machine studying fashions. A brand new cloud was formally launched on Oct. 29 that will be accessible on an hourly, month-to-month or long-term foundation.

An group referred to as Voltage Park “currently offer[s] bare-metal access for large-scale users that need peak performance” and expects to broaden its service by early 2024, in accordance to a statement on its web site. It has round 24,000 NVIDIA H100 graphics processing models (GPUs) grouped into interconnected clusters. Voltage Park is a subsidiary of Navigation Fund.

The {hardware} is value $500 million. Clusters will be arrange in Texas, Virginia and Washington, Voltage Park CEO Eric Park told Reuters. Park joined the group in July.

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Voltage Park is at the moment auctioning off contracts with lengths of 1 to three months on 1,560 GPUs. It stated in its announcement:

“The market for cutting-edge ML compute is broken. Startups, researchers and even big AI labs are scrambling to buy or rent access to the latest chips for ML training. […] We’re on a mission to make machine learning infrastructure accessible to all.”

The Navigation Fund was based in 2023 with plans to provide a small variety of grants this 12 months and broaden its packages in early 2024. It plans to advance quite a few causes as well as to “safe AI.”

Billionaire McCaleb created Mt. Gox to commerce Magic: The Gathering playing cards, then repurposed it as a Bitcoin (BTC) change and sold it in 2011, three years earlier than its collapse. He went on to turn out to be a co-founder of Ripple Labs, and after leaving Ripple on dangerous phrases with the remainder of the administration, he co-founded the Stellar blockchain. He additionally created a space station startup in 2022 that has partnered with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

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