AI Companies Turn to Distributed Computing in Homes

If you own an at-home server, a gaming computer, or just a laptop that doesn’t get much love, listen up. You can now put that spare computing power to use and earn some passive income in the process. AI companies are hungry for more compute to run AI inference—the process of using a pre-trained model to respond to queries—and they’re willing to pay you for it.

“Imagine Uber or Airbnb, but for AI inference computing tasks,” says Ilman Shazhaev, founder and CEO of Far Labs, based in Abu Dhabi.

The AI boom has spurred on construction of massive data centers, often damaging local communities by raising electricity prices, straining local water resources, causing environmental damage and noise, and being just plain ugly. Huge data centers are likely not going anywhere—training new frontier models and running AI models from leading companies will likely still be the purview of these behemoths. But now, several companies are providing AI inference on smaller, mostly open-source models. They are running inference on pre-existing computing power spread throughout homes and small businesses, and compensating owners.

“Everyone thinks the only way to do it is data centers. And data centers are extractive for the communities in which they’re built, and they don’t return services or taxes or much of anything to the people there. So why not just turn this whole thing on its head?” says John Federico, founder and CEO of Evolving Edge, in Austin, Texas. “The compute power is out there. If you can orchestrate it, then you’re actually adding value to those communities directly.”

The idea isn’t entirely new: From 1999 to 2020, a volunteer-based project called SETI@Home used spare computers to search for signs of extraterrestrial life in radio telescope data, for instance. But now, commercial companies are eager to use the same strategy. Shazhaev’s Far Labs is launching its platform Far AI in the coming weeks, while Federico’s Evolving Edge is currently in open beta. Other companies, like Bless Network, Salad, and Gradient have started to provide similar platforms over the last year.

Connecting to the network

Federico has been a computer hobbyist since youth, and he has amassed a whole server in his basement to run his projects. “It just hit me one day, there’s all this talk about not having enough compute, and I just thought, well, 92 percent of the country has broadband, and you have people like me who have mini data centers in a closet,” he says.

Federico sees the potential hosts as people much like himself who have already invested in home servers, and he aims to make the process of selling spare compute as seamless for them as possible.

“Sign up for the program, install an application,” Federico says. “All we want to do is run jobs on your machine when you tell us we’re allowed to. The only thing we do is monitor the resource usage. And of course, you can give us a schedule.” With a large enough network of devices,…