AI Is Eating Up All The Computing Power

In case you haven’t noticed, AI is everywhere right now. ChatGPT was all anyone was talking about for a little bit — but now there’s the AI illustrator Midjourney, the AI voice replicator from ElevenLabs, and all the other ChatGPT competitors like Google Bard and Bing’s chatbot.

And they are all gobbling up computing power.

The biggest winner appears to be chipmaker Nvidia — the first of its computing hardware ilk to surpass a $1 trillion market cap to join the ranks of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Apple.

But as all of these AI applications compete, they are also competing over a limited supply of computing power and servers — and Nvidia can’t pump out its chips fast enough. Last week, Elon Musk even joked during an interview with the Wall Street Journal that graphics processing units (GPUs) like Nvidia’s chips, are now harder to score than drugs.

But Nvidia isn’t the only bet speculators have identified in the AI arms race. As its stock gives back some of its recent 30% rally and 175% rally year-to-date, I couldn’t help but notice two crypto projects surging 200% and 500% in 2023 for the same reason. And as battles over cloud computing power are likely to intensify, the prospect of an alternative only gets more interesting.

I’m talking about Akash Network and Render Network. If you haven’t heard of them, I wouldn’t blame you. But they are interesting crypto projects with real use cases that both claim to be building decentralized networks for people to loan our access to spare computing power.

As Akash Network founder Greg Osuri told me, his project is essentially an "Airbnb for cloud computing.” The metaphor is that just as Airbnb allowed people to be paid for unused space, Akash lets people with idle chips be paid to loan them out for use by developers all around the world.

It’s pretty intriguing — especially since many believe that AWS, Microsoft, and Google controlling two-thirds of the cloud market isn’t a good thing. Perhaps a decentralized competitor would be good to counter the data giants.

To better understand Akash and Render, check out the full Coinage episode below, or read our full article at Coinage.Media.