Every artificial intelligence startup in the world needs access to GPUs. But they’ve become increasingly hard to find.

However, that might be changing thanks to an enormous new purchase of computing hardware.

What’s happening:

• Jed McCaleb, who is widely known for being the co-founder of Stellar, Ripple and aerospace company Vast, has purchased $500 million of GPUs
• This is one of the largest ever purchases of GPUs, rivalling similar sized purchases from Elon Musk and Tether

Why it matters:

• There has been a global race for securing computing power to train large language models and generative AI which both require access to GPUs
• This new cluster of GPUs will likely help numerous startups accelerate their innovation in artificial intelligence and machine learning models

Going deeper:

• Jed McCaleb made the purchase of Nvidia H100’s through a non profit called Navigation Fund
• Navigation Fund then transferred the ownership of all the GPUs to Voltage Park, which is a for profit subsidiary of the Navigation Fund
• Voltage Park is building their GPU cluster across Texas, Virginia and Washington

The intrigue:

• Despite the cluster of GPUs being very new, it is already being used by Silicon Valley darling and a16z backed startup Character.AI for model experimentation