We build large scale gpu clusters and sell them on contracts you can sublease.
San Francisco, California
Joined August 2023
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San Francisco Compute retweeted
SF Compute CEO @evanjconrad advises AI founders to raise 10X more capital than planned, potentially $1 billion, just to secure compute:
"I would raise as much money as I can. I would take your round and I would add 10X to it. And if I was an investor, I would buy compute instead."
"I would either try to find a big investment grade normal company that I can partner with and use their balance sheet to co-sign on the lease with me, or I would try to raise the biggest round I possibly can, so I’m above the bar."
"If you’re trying to raise a round, I think you should try and raise like a billion dollars. I know. That’s the problem. This is why the article was called End of Startups. I don’t think many people can raise a billion dollar round."
"If you don’t fix the debt problem, most of the portfolios of various venture firms are gonna consolidate or get wiped out, or they will convert into basically GPU clouds."
@sfcompute
Pretty much.
As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.
That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.
San Francisco Compute retweeted
if you care about startups, have a balance sheet, and you would like to backstop this at a scale that is larger than what we can, we would like to work with you
if we don't fix this, we believe the industry will consolidate into a few large credit worthy players
dms open
San Francisco Compute retweeted
This seems right to me, unfortunately, and it is essentially a species of interest-rate rise (the opportunity cost of capital is increasing). It is true that forward and futures markets for compute, and making compute into a financial commodity, would help here.
San Francisco Compute retweeted
The Programmable Data Center
@martin_casado’s Nicira virtualized networking by separating the control plane from the hardware. Cisco offered $600m; VMware bought it for $1.3b.
Now that idea is coming to GPU infrastructure.
@evanjconrad, CEO of @sfcompute, joins @swyx at @aiDotEngineer NYC to explain how SF Compute went from subleasing a cluster to making data centers programmable.
We get into:
• Why delivering a GPU trade means running the whole “hotel”
• Interruptions, hardware generations and the GPU order book
• Why physical settlement comes before compute derivatives
• Why Evan thinks NVIDIA can’t build an independent market
• Programmable InfiniBand and the data center as software
The full conversation:
San Francisco Compute retweeted
Introducing the Haight Street Compute Market.
A one-day trading floor where vetted buyers and sellers of compute meet and sign deals in person. Nov 17, at the old Federal Reserve building in San Francisco.
Request your invite: luma.com/86cjwpui
San Francisco Compute retweeted
Everyone wants to be a “compute market” until it means sending your CTO into a monsoon to vet a data center
Eric park is a beast btw. wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-computing…
SF Autoresearch
- has capacity
- for training runs
- with IB & cluster local storage
- without a long term contract
- without a big deposit
- without a sales conversation
- on an easy to use PaaS
SF Autoresearch (formerly givemeanode) now supports jobs with full InfiniBand fabrics!
That means you can queue hero runs into all of SFC's available capacity, without a long term reservation, a long lead time, or a big downpayment.
sfcompute.com/news/autoresea…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
New .cube viewer on Ouro. Explore 3D or 2D slices of charge density, spin density, bonding (deformation) density, and orbitals.
Heavily inspired by @gp_0013's work visualizing electron (+spin) density and s/o his latest post with @sfcompute, the blog aesthetic is beautiful.
San Francisco Compute retweeted
SF Compute CEO @evanjconrad compares today’s compute market to electricity before the power grid.
He explains that before utilities pooled demand, factories had to build enough generation for their own peak usage, leaving expensive capacity idle the rest of the time.
“Every factory ran its own generator. And they had to size that generator for peak capacity. Then during idle hours they would just sort of burn that money.”
“What happened in the power markets is that utilities came in and they pooled demand between all of these different factories.”
“By doing that, you made the economics of all the factories better.”
“This is how we scaled up electrification in the country.”
“This is what people are trying to do with compute markets.”
San Francisco Compute retweeted
We're announcing Elastic InfiniBand Partitions in SFC.
You can now get RDMA connected nodes reserved, change plans, and sell your whole contract on the fly. That’s not “sell to spot”, that’s “sell the whole contract”.
Launch the 30-day hero run on Monday, hit the snag on Tuesday, get out of the contract on Wednesday.
Running a PaaS and your customers need their own partitions? Create thousands of partitions, one for each customer. Lots of providers give IB, but all on the same partition, which means it’s not secure enough for production.
sfcompute.com/news/elastic-i…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
Hiring 2 people to join my team at @sfcompute. One person to help me with supply-side compute deals and another to manage cluster stand-up. If you're bullish on AI infra, compute markets, sovereign AI, like to win, and get back up quickly when you don't, drop me a line.
jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute
San Francisco Compute retweeted
We sat down with Rich Jaycobs, the former president of Cantor Futures Exchange & legendary creator of 7 exchanges & 6 clearing houses, and 1/5 of all approved DCMs since 2000.
Here's what it really takes to build a compute market.
sfcompute.com/news/commodity…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
We just put out a writeup on an in-house ledger we built to keep track of compute reservations as they're resold! Check it out :)
sfcompute.com/news/abel-ledg…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
We're hiring a director of governance, risk & compliance at SFC.
We build & manage large scale supercomputers.
As a GRC director, your role helps build the company into an institution that earns the trust that has been placed in us.
sfcompute.com/news/hiring-di…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
Givemeanode is now SF Autoresearch, a new product from SFC.
We built the scalable, resilient platform for agent-driven machine learning research.
The current moment is important and we want to help you take it seriously.
sfcompute.com/news/sfc-autor…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
right now, buying compute is just an absolutely awful experience, regardless of who you buy from. it's backroom deals, backed up supply chains, broken hardware, and large, risky purchases in a high stress environment.
san francisco compute exists to try and solve these problems. our team has grown from the tiny ai lab that was desperately just trying to sublease our cluster, to a force to be reckoned with: real veterans of the industry, the same folks that built & financed the other neoclouds.
our team is incredible & has produced some remarkable work that i'm really excited to celebrate, but we haven't solved the problem yet. we have solved a few things, but our jobs not done.
i often don't talk about sfc's success because even though we have grown ridiculously fast, there is still just so much more ahead of us.
we see the hard technical problems that accompany supercomputing and the nasty financial problems that accompany its financing as linked.
the path to scaling ai is through safety. the bottleneck of ai is risk and our mission is to reduce that risk.
it's a tricky, nuanced problem that requires bright minds. if you're one of those, we'd love for you to join us at the san francisco compute company.
we have a long way to go
San Francisco Compute retweeted
San Francisco Compute has closed a few more deals.
sfcompute.com/news/tcv-q3-20…
San Francisco Compute retweeted
the average on-platform customer on sfcompute saves about 25%
it's the difference between $4.5/hr and $3.3/hr
we wrote about why and how you can scale faster with reduced risk
sfcompute.com/news/realized-…
