There is significant demand for high end commercial GPU’s and a growing demand for high end commodity GPU’s for running AI models. Currently there are several marketplaces such as runpod.io, vast.ai and clore.ai. The demand of GPU’s on these sites comes and goes with the flavor of the week AI token rugpull, but there seems to be baseline demand we should be capitalizing on.
For comparison, vast and runpod are well developed, but expensive and require a LARGE GPU collection to be considered to have your capacity added. Clore does allow anyone to add capacity, but it doesn’t seem to work very well.
For us to market ourselves to GPU renters we need to have many GPU’s online. And for those GPU owners to come online, they need renters. A chicken and the egg scenario.
So, we need to attract high end GPU’s to our grid through grants (and some education of our perks), before we approach renters. Thus, I proposed a healthy grant to owners of GPU’s who bring their capacity to us.
Nodes with high end GPU’s can be eligible for a one time TFT bonus after a full month online. Node owners must request this bonus after a month by a post on this or another thread.
GPU owners will want to come to TF not only for the bonus, but also because they will earn TFT even when not rented out. These same people may self-advertise their capacity in addition to official and community efforts.
I would recommend we limit the offer to these GPUs https://www.runpod.io/console/deploy with addition of maybe 4080 and 3090 (or similar). I am not going to suggest the amount quite yet, but the bonus should be at least $100 of TFT. The cheapest of these cards is almost $2000.
We should follow the approval of this grant with a coordinated effort to make both GPU owners and renters aware of the marketplace.