PoolCompute: Building the global compute exchange

Imagine a world where accessing computational power is as easy as buying stocks. That's the promise of a global compute exchange. It's not just a nice-to-have; it's a necessary evolution in the field of high-performance computing.

Why? Because the current system is painfully inefficient.

Take H100 GPUs. Their hourly rates range from $1.2 to $18. That's not a typo. The same resource can cost 15 times more depending on where you look. This isn't just a pricing quirk—it's a symptom of a fragmented, opaque market.

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Why the GPU market sucks?

94% of new GPUs sold by NVIDIA go to Big Tech companies. The rest of us—AI startups, researchers, gamers—fight over the scraps. There's no real marketplace, just a mess of phone calls and negotiations. Today, no unified GPU marketplace exists; acquiring large GPU compute happens behinds closed doors through phone negotiations and high variance:

• Fragmented and Volatile with H100 GPU pricing: $1.2 to $18/hour
• Underutilization of High-end GPUs which are often 20-50%+ idle
• Large GPU clusters rarely available on-demand
• GPU orchestration of decentralized global GPUs is a technical challenge
• 100x reliability variance in multi-node clusters

These problems—price disparities, underutilization, and accessibility issues—aren't just inconveniences. They're handbrakes on innovation. They're slowing down AI research, hampering scientific breakthroughs, and stifling startups that could be the next big thing.

Need for Pool Compute Exchange

We need a compute exchange. Think of what the NYSE did for stocks. Before it, buying shares meant finding someone willing to sell and haggling over the price. Sound familiar?

A compute exchange would do for GPUs what the NYSE did for stocks. It would create a real-time marketplace where anyone could buy or sell computing resources. Prices would adjust based on supply and demand. Idle GPUs would find eager users. Massive compute power would be a click away.

"We will turn compute into a commodity" - Kaushik Tiwari, Founder

By pooling global GPU resources in a single platform---PoolCompute is a able to flip GPU market dynamics to suit the buyer of compute in an open marketplace where anyone could buy or sell computing resources. Prices would adjust in real-time based on supply and demand. Underutilized resources would find eager users. Large-scale compute power would be just a few clicks away.

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Making Compute "Commodity"

The GPU market lacks standardized market mechanisms. No open marketplace, standardized spot markets or futures contracts exist. This leads to inefficiencies and uncertainties that stifle growth and innovation.

This isn't a new idea.

Imagine if farmers had no way to hedge against price fluctuations. They’d have to sell their crops at whatever price the market dictated at the moment, making it nearly impossible to plan effectively. The introduction of futures contracts in agriculture solved this problem, allowing farmers to lock in prices and plan their production more efficiently.

By creating a similar system for computational power, we could bring the same level of stability and efficiency to the GPU market. Standardized spot markets and futures contracts would allow buyers and sellers to hedge against price fluctuations and plan their resource usage more effectively. This would make compute a true commodity, as accessible and tradeable as agricultural products or stocks.

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Making GPU Mega Clusters Available to all

But building this isn't just about creating a website where people can trade GPU time. The technical challenges are immense.

Imagine building a cluster of 1024 GPUs. You're not just plugging in a bunch of gaming rigs. You're trying to get a thousand finicky, high-performance machines to work in perfect harmony. You have to solve problems of:

• Latency: Every microsecond counts when synchronizing 1024 GPUs.
• Data Transfer: Moving data efficiently between GPUs is like choreographing a thousand-person bucket brigade.
• Fault Tolerance: In a system this complex, failures are inevitable. Building in redundancy is critical.

These are hard problems. But they're the kind of problems that, when solved, change everything. The solutions we develop won't just power a compute exchange—they'll redefine how we approach large-scale computing.

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Our Vision

A global compute exchange isn't just a good idea—it's an inevitable one. The economic benefits are too significant to ignore. It will democratize access to high-performance computing, accelerate innovation, and unlock new possibilities in AI and beyond. The current system is holding us back. It's like trying to run a modern economy on barter. It works, sort of, but it's painfully inefficient.

The question isn't whether it will happen, but when. And who will make it happen.

So, who's up for building the NYSE of compute power with us? Email us at careers@poolcompute.com