A Startup Is Looking to Pay 30% Yield by Tokenizing AI Infrastructure

Compute Labs, a startup that turns the industrial-grade GPUs that power AI data centres into fractionalized yield-bearing tokens, and enterprise AI cloud firm NexGen Cloud, have joined forces to begin distributing ownership of a $1 million "public vault," the companies said on Wednesday.

The power and profitability of AI infrastructure are largely centralized and generally confined to hyperscalers like AWS or large venture-backed firms. However, Compute Labs is attempting to bring its token holders direct access to the earning potential of enterprise hardware such as NVIDIA H200 GPUs, which would retail at around $30,000 for a single unit.

"For investors, this pilot [project] represents the first-ever opportunity to earn stablecoin yield directly from live AI compute without having to manage the hardware or rely on overvalued public equities," Compute Labs said in a press release.

Europe’s NexGen, which gives its customers access to AI computing power and had raised $45 million in April, will handle the initial financing through its investment arm InfraHub Compute.

How it works

The funds raised will be used by InfraHub to buy GPUs, which will then be fractionalised for investors and customers, according to the press release.

The first "vault" has already raised $1 million from investors. The initial vault will have top-of-the-range NVIDIA GPUs, which are currently used for "AI training and inference," the firm said. The firms are projecting to have a yield, in USDC, that might go over 30% per year based on active enterprise GPU rental agreements.

Nikolay Filichkin, chief business officer at Compute Labs, talks to the type of data center operators who might have additional floor space and are looking to add extra capacity; the data center equivalent of “mom and pop shops,” he said in an interview with CoinDesk.

“When the data center is using the GPU owned by an investor, Compute Labs manages that through its protocol and balance sheet, and leases the GPUs to the data center,” Filichkin said in an interview. “The net revenue, minus things like hosting and energy costs, goes back to the investor who owns a slice of the GPU processing power.”

The firms tokenize and fractionalize these GPUs within the vaults, which can then be offered to individual investors in increments of a few hundred dollars. NFTs are also used to distinguish between varying types of tokenized GPU hardware investments.

Compute Labs is backed by Protocol Labs, OKX Ventures, CMS Holdings and Amber Group, among others. The firm operates with a flat 10% fee structure across tokenization, asset management and performance yield.

“This model assigns concrete, tradable value to each GPU cycle, rationalizing the AI market by removing the speculation of investors, and directly linking supply, demand, and price," said Youlian Tzanev, co-founder and chief strategy officer at NexGen Cloud.