Former Google, Nvidia Execs Launch Company to Ease GPU Crunch

Anjney Midha, a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and former executives at Google, Apple and Nvidia have launched a company that aims to make it easier and more affordable for smaller companies or startups to access such compute. The move comes as Microsoft and other cloud providers have diverted server stockpiles to their internal teams or bigger customers.

To do so, the new company, National Compute, seeks to pool idle AI server capacity at cloud providers in the U.S. and U.S.-friendly countries. Companies that rent AI servers from cloud providers, but which may not utilize them 100% of the time, have committed to providing 750 megawatts of capacity to the pool of servers National Compute plans to sell to its own customers. (That amount of servers, such as Nvidia graphics processing units, would typically cost tens of billions of dollars a year to rent.)

Midha said National Compute already has more than $5 billion in reservations, or demand from potential customers.

The new effort spotlights a problem in the market for GPUs that is hitting smaller customers particularly hard. Midha said that sometimes, large customers that reserve dedicated GPU capacity at cloud providers might use only a small portion of it. National Compute would try to reduce such waste by finding renters for the unused capacity and could give both the large customer and the cloud provider a cut of the new rental revenue.

National Compute’s co-founders haven’t finalized its corporate structure, including who will own how much equity, nor have they settled on a specific business model. They’re seeking feedback on the plan and this week will submit an academic paper outlining National Compute’s strategy. AMP, another company Midha launched this year to make AI servers available to more companies, is putting together a group of companies to manage National Compute as a consortium, he said. AMP could also own a stake in the new company. (He declined to share the names of National Compute’s co-founders.)