Aethir aims to become the AirBnB of spare graphics processing units (GPUs), Dan Wang, the co-founder and chief business officer of Aethir, told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview.
“[Aethir] is a bit like Airbnb, where there are spare vacation homes that are being underutilized, and there’s obviously a demand for some of that unused vacation home time. […] So, at the very base level, we service as a kind of Airbnb for GPU computing.”
Backed by Nvidia, Aethir is building a decentralized, enterprise-grade GPU cloud infrastructure network for artificial intelligence (AI) and gaming applications.
“Overall GPU utilization is quite low,” said Wang, adding that Aethir’s intelligent routing feature aims to bolster this, by matching the type of computing demand with the right type of GPU power.
Higher GPU utilization could lead to more advanced AI use cases due to the decreased cost of computing power, according to Aethir’s Wang. He said:
“What we foresee happening is a virtuous cycle. The more utilization that we can find for all this GPU computing that’s out there, the higher the utilization, and they can lower their service fees because they’re getting back the invested capital.”
Aethir is preparing to launch its initial node offering, starting March 14, while the public node sale will take place on March 20.
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While there is a major global GPU shortage, a significant part of this issue is due to the underutilization of older GPU models, according to Aethir’s Wang. He said:
“There are a lot of older generation GPUs that are severely underutilized, […] but they haven’t found consistent steady use case and demand for it to be fully utilized.”
Chipmaker Nvidia has previously struggled to meet the demand for its GPUs, which are popular among gaming customers and cryptocurrency miners. Nvidia first started having GPU supply issues in 2017, as the bull run of that year attracted more people to crypto mining. After cooling off somewhat in the following years, the GPU shortage emerged once again in 2020 and has shown no signs of abating.
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