Crypto billionaire's non-profit buys US$500 million of AI data-centre chips

A NON-PROFIT organisation funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb bought roughly US$500 million of Nvidia advanced chips, and plans to lease computing capacity to companies for artificial intelligence (AI) projects.

The AI cloud-computing organisation, called Voltage Park, has 24,000 Nvidia H100 chips, CEO Eric Park said.

The operation plans to offer long and short-term, low-cost AI computing to help alleviate the shortage of AI chips.

“It’s our belief that basically the current ecosystem for machine learning is broken,” Park noted.

Voltage plans to set up clusters of the Nvidia AI chips in Texas, Virginia and Washington. It has some running and plans to fully deploy the 24,000 Nvidia chips by about February.

After the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year, demand for Nvidia’s advanced AI silicon soared as businesses scrambled for chips to power their AI ambitions.

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Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and a host of startups sell competing AI chips that are also in heavy demand.

McCaleb amassed a fortune as founder of three well-known cryptocurrency companies: Mt Gox, Ripple and Stellar. Ripple developed a blockchain with a cryptocurrency called XRP, and the founders received 20 billion XRP, which at its peak was worth nearly US$80 billion.

San Mateo, California-based Voltage is a wholly-owned subsidiary of McCaleb’s non-profit Navigation Fund. Any profit Voltage earns will be sent to Navigation. McCaleb does not operate or sit on the board of either the non-profit or Voltage. REUTERS