Ripple Co-Founder's Nonprofit Navigation Fund Addresses AI Chip Shortage with Leasable Capacity

According to Cointelegraph, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb's nonprofit organization, Navigation Fund, is addressing the AI chip shortage by offering leasable capacity for large machine learning models through its subsidiary, Voltage Park. The new cloud service was officially launched on October 29 and will be accessible on an hourly, monthly, or long-term basis. Voltage Park currently offers bare-metal access for large-scale users that need peak performance and plans to expand its service by early 2024. The company has approximately 24,000 NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) grouped into interconnected clusters, with the hardware valued at $500 million.Clusters will be set up in Texas, Virginia, and Washington, according to Voltage Park CEO Eric Park. The organization is currently auctioning off contracts with lengths of one-to-three months on 1,560 GPUs. In its announcement, Voltage Park stated that the market for cutting-edge machine learning compute is broken, with startups, researchers, and even big AI labs scrambling to buy or rent access to the latest chips for machine learning training. The Navigation Fund was founded in 2023 with plans to provide a small number of grants this year and expand its programs in early 2024. In addition to promoting 'safe AI,' the fund aims to advance various other causes.