ai-compute
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Rumble’s Second Act Is Bigger Than Video
The free-speech video challenger is assembling ads, creator tools, crypto payments and AI infrastructure under one roof. Its wager is that independence - from algorithms to servers - can become a business, not just a slogan.
The San Francisco Compute Company
The San Francisco Compute Company (SF Compute) runs a real-time marketplace for AI compute. It buys and operates large-scale, vetted GPU clusters - primarily Nvidia H100s wired with 3.2Tb/s InfiniBand - and sells them on flexible contracts, from a single hour to multiple years, that buyers can also resell. By turning long-term GPU capacity into a liquid spot market with transparent pricing, SF Compute lets startups, researchers, and enterprises buy exactly the compute they need without the multi-year commitments that dominate the industry, while pointing toward a future of cash-settled GPU futures.
OpenGradient
OpenGradient is a New York-based decentralized infrastructure company building the compute layer for verifiable AI. Its network hosts, executes, and verifies machine-learning models on-chain, attaching cryptographic proofs to every inference so applications, agents, and blockchains can confirm exactly which model ran, on what input, and what it returned. The stack pairs an EVM-compatible chain with a heterogeneous GPU/TEE compute architecture, a decentralized Model Hub of 2,000+ models, and developer SDKs, positioning it as an open, auditable alternative to closed cloud AI endpoints.
Unblock
Unblock builds and operates mobile, modular data centers that plug directly into wasted energy - gas that would otherwise be flared at oil wells, methane venting off landfills, and renewable power that gets curtailed for lack of grid capacity. By converting that stranded energy into computing power on-site, the company turns an environmental liability into revenue for energy producers while cutting emissions. Founded in 2021 and led by CEO Tomas Ocampo, Unblock has scaled to roughly 15 MW of deployed capacity across Latin America, claims the world's second-largest computing fleet at oil-field facilities, and eliminates an estimated 142,000 tons of CO2 equivalent annually.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP)
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) is an infrastructure developer and holding company that builds and operates businesses reshaping how energy and digital systems work together. Founded inside Alphabet in 2017 and spun out as independent in 2019 by Sidewalk Labs veterans Jonathan Winer and Brian Barlow, SIP raised $400 million in 2020 backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. It identifies bottlenecks in physical infrastructure, then pairs technology with capital to create new operating companies - most recently Renew Home, a roughly one-gigawatt residential virtual power plant, and Verrus, which designs large-scale data centers that flex their grid draw on demand.
FlexAI
FlexAI is a Paris-based AI infrastructure company building a 'universal AI compute' layer that lets teams deploy, train, and serve models across diverse GPU architectures and cloud providers without wrestling with the underlying hardware. Founded in 2023 by former Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, and Tesla veterans, it raised a $30M seed round in April 2024 and is positioning itself as Europe's answer to the GPU-as-a-service crunch.