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The $200,000 Answer to a Billion-Dollar Question
HPC-AI Tech sells a way to make expensive AI work less expensively. Its open-source video model supplies the most interesting receipt: an 11-billion-parameter experiment built for a reported $200,000.
The GPU Exchange That Became an AI Lab
Prime Intellect began by pooling scattered GPUs. Now it sells the rest of the work: environments, training, evaluation and deployment for teams that want agents shaped by their own tasks.
Nous Research
Nous Research is an open-source AI lab founded in 2023 that builds world-class open-weight language models - most notably its Hermes family - and decentralized infrastructure for training them. Its Psyche network coordinates heterogeneous GPUs across the internet via the Solana blockchain, offering a community-driven, transparent alternative to closed labs like OpenAI. Backed by Paradigm and others, the company positions open, unrestricted models as a counterweight to centralized AI.
VESSL AI
VESSL AI is an MLOps and GPU-cloud company that helps AI teams train, deploy, and scale machine learning models without wrestling with infrastructure. Its platform pools GPU capacity across on-premise clusters and multiple cloud providers, automatically routing workloads to the cheapest available resources - a hybrid, multi-cloud approach the company says can cut GPU spend by up to 80%. Founded in 2020 by ex-Google and PUBG engineers and split between Seoul and the San Francisco Bay Area, VESSL serves roughly 50 enterprise customers and 2,000-plus users, and has expanded into AI-agent tooling with its open-source Hyperpocket project.