California-based Voltage Park, a wholly owned subsidiary of nonprofit Navigation Fund, has announced the purchase of around $500 million of Nvidia advanced chips, alongside plans to lease computing capacity to businesses for AI projects.
The AI cloud computing platform has 24000 Nvidia H100 chips and aims to offer both short and long term low cost computing to reduce shortages in AI data center chips. Nvidia chip hubs will be set up in Texas, Virginia and Washington, as well as revealing plans to deploy the existing chips by February 2024.
Following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, Nvidia’s advanced AI silicon demand increased rapidly as companies raced to acquire chips for improving AI capabilities. Demand continues to grow across the board for AI chips, which reportedly can save money for data centers focused on large language models and high computing capacities. The chips are able to run at faster speeds and more efficiently and effectively than CPUs. Thus the larger the number of chips in use, the higher the consequential savings.
The nonprofit, funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb, sees any profit earned by Voltage sent to Navigation. He does not currently operate as part of the board for Navigation nor Voltage. McCaleb’s wealth has been garnered through founding three high-profile cryptocurrency firms – Mt Gox, Stellar and Ripple. The latter developed a blockchain operating with cryptocurrency XRP, subsequently gaining its founders 20 billion XRP. At its height this was worth almost US $80 billion.