Renting Out Your Idle Gaming PC: Two Startups Enter the AI Compute Market

Two startups, Far Labs and Evolving Edge, are launching marketplaces to rent out idle gaming PCs for AI tasks. The platforms aim to provide a way for individuals with powerful hardware to monetize their underutilized devices.

Far Labs' Far AI platform is set to launch in the coming weeks, promising latency of 100 ms or less. Evolving Edge is already running an open beta, distributing jobs using the open-source framework Ray. Both companies are targeting smaller open-source models rather than large-scale workloads.

The platforms plan to isolate inference tasks from host machines, with encrypted communication and hard limits on GPU, CPU, memory, storage, and network access. This is intended to mitigate risks such as malicious code or unauthorized access.

While the concept of renting out idle hardware for AI compute has been around, Far Labs and Evolving Edge are joining an established player, Salad, which lists over 60,000 daily active consumer GPUs on its network. However, distributed AI compute faces a credibility problem, with concerns about profitability and the accuracy of unsubstantiated claims.

Salad's business model has been questioned, with estimates suggesting that users earn only around 14 cents for every dollar generated by their hardware. With electricity costs factored in, some hosts may be paying for the privilege of having a job. The two startups will need to address these concerns if they are to gain traction in the market.