compute
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The Bitcoin Miner That Decided It Was Really an Energy Company
MARA runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts of computing across four continents, holds more than 50,000 bitcoin, and now wants to sell you the cooling tanks and energy software behind it all.
Blacksmith
Blacksmith is a San Francisco-based developer-tools startup building a high-performance CI cloud. Its drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners boots each job into a Firecracker microVM on bare-metal gaming CPUs, letting engineering teams run their pipelines up to 2x faster at roughly half the cost. Backed by Y Combinator and Google Ventures, Blacksmith serves thousands of engineering teams - including Vercel, Supabase, Mercury, Clerk and Ashby - and pairs raw compute with observability and security tooling built specifically for CI workloads.
Hammerhead AI
Hammerhead AI is a Redwood City data center infrastructure startup that uses reinforcement learning agents to turn stranded power into usable AI compute. Its ORCA platform (Orchestrated RL Control Agents) coordinates power, cooling, and GPU workloads in real time so operators can raise token throughput by up to 30% within their existing power envelope - without waiting for new grid capacity. Founded in 2024 by former AutoGrid executives Rahul Kar and Rajeev Singh, the company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures.
NodeShift
NodeShift is a decentralized cloud platform that aggregates spare compute, GPU and storage capacity from independent data centers and web3 networks, then resells it through one simplified UI and a single API. By tapping underused infrastructure instead of building hyperscale data centers, NodeShift offers developers and enterprises GPUs, virtual machines and storage at prices it claims are up to 70-80% cheaper than traditional cloud providers - positioning itself as a 'sovereign AI cloud' for teams that want affordable, distributed, compliance-friendly compute.
Hyperbolic
Hyperbolic is an open-access AI cloud built for developers and researchers. It aggregates underutilized GPUs from data centers, mining farms and idle machines into an on-demand marketplace, and pairs that with serverless inference for state-of-the-art open-source models. The pitch is simple: fast, affordable access to compute and inference without sales calls or feature gates, at prices it says can run up to 75% below incumbents.
RunPod
RunPod is an AI cloud infrastructure company that provides on-demand GPU compute for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI/ML models. Founded in 2022 by two former Comcast engineers who pivoted their Ethereum mining rigs into AI servers, RunPod grew to $120M ARR with just $22M raised by early 2026, serving 500,000+ developers across 183 countries. Its marketplace model, per-second billing, and support for 30+ GPU SKUs — from consumer RTX 4090s to enterprise H100s and B200s — make it a capital-efficient disruptor to hyperscaler GPU clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure.