AI Compute for Everyone: The Dyson Sphere
Imagine a world where AI compute is thousands of times cheaper and thousands of times more available.
AI compute that is running on near free energy and not putting any demand on our grids on Earth.
This our long range vision at Strong Compute.
Today, we’re working on the best way to use compute on Earth, but not too far from now, we’re looking much bigger.
We're looking towards Sol, because we believe that broadly accessible AI compute isn’t just about breaking down barriers here on the ground. It’s about setting humanity up to thrive, and to do that, we need much more than Earth can, or should, provide.
How it Started
I started in technology building computers in my bedroom as a kid, and some years later had knocked together thousands of them - some with a focus on price, others with maximum speed as the goal, or the best in reliability.
From there, I got into startups, augmented reality hardware, residential hackathons, and then Strong Compute.
Along the way, I realised there was a deeper goal worth chasing: freeing people from the constraints of compute power so they could innovate at will. Strong Compute’s mission is exactly that—we’re here to make it feel like all the compute power in the world is plugged directly into your laptop. And we’re nearly there :-).
At Strong Compute, we want your machine learning workloads to scale effortlessly. No more worrying about infrastructure, pipelines, or cluster configurations. Just pure, unfettered creativity, where you can spend your time experimenting and pushing boundaries.
And for the execs reading, this is here to make your life work as well - a complete live picture of all AI resources in your company, the ability to limit costs on any dimension, and a much more attractive place for AI talent to work.
Strong Compute: Speed.
A great developer experience means removing clutter from your workflow (ie. ops) and giving you the best reactivity possible.
We’ve hit record-breaking speeds on commodity clusters with 90 GB per second file read, 60GB/sec from object storage to cluster and 20GB from object storage to a single instance. This is all purely software and runs on commodity cloud. No specialised hardware is required.
We’ve built the world’s fastest container registry, so you can pull a 70 GB container onto a machine and have it running in under 10 seconds.
These numbers are hundreds to thousands of times faster than what most people experience today. And we made it cheaper too. As much as 10x lower cost than many widely used options.
Raw speed is great, but the ability to iterate quickly as a dev means not waiting on management decisions as well. You want a lot of compute and management wants to not break the bank.
We’ve made it insanely simple to keep tabs on costs. You get complete control over your compute spend, which means no surprises. Integrate multicloud bill caps. Spend allocation across any combination of instances. Stop being constrained to one box on one provider in one region, and at the same time, no more sudden bill spikes because you forgot to cap usage—we make that easy.
You can watch your compute jobs spread across the world, visualize the whole team’s usage, and move workloads around any providers clusters however you need.
Want to give it a go? Join our next Chess Hackathon, a perfect chance to experience Strong Compute in action. Bring your AI ideas, take on our high-performance clusters, and watch your chess bot compete live.
Who’s Using This? Pioneers on the Edge of AI
We’re fortunate to work with some of the most forward-thinking researchers and developers around. From training human neural tissue in petri dishes to work like an AI chip, to exploring new alternatives to gradient descent, our users are breaking new ground in AI. No wrappers here.
One team in Berkeley is even modeling social science questions by training language models to reflect the behavior of different populations.
Each month, we run hackathons and provide research grants from $10K to $100K, putting our resources in the hands of people breaking new ground in AI. If you’ve got an idea that would shake how things are done today, we want to fund it.
Want to hear more about this vision? Watch my full talk on how democratizing compute and the Dyson sphere vision come together.
Let’s Talk Dyson Spheres
Here’s where I get most excited. AI compute needs power, and lots of it. We’re seeing demand skyrocket—but what if we could access an energy source that’s virtually unlimited?
Enter the Dyson Sphere concept, an inspiring concept first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson: build a massive cluster of structures around the sun to capture nearly all of its energy. Think about that—all the energy we’d ever need, without impacting Earth’s resources or environment.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Moving compute infrastructure into space is the first step, lowering our dependence on Earth’s finite resources and lack of willingness to keep a solar panel in sunlight 24x7. And the energy potential is staggering. Right now, the sun emits about two billion times the energy that hits Earth. In space, solar doesn’t need batteries. With a Dyson Sphere, we’re talking about harnessing nearly all of that energy to fuel AI compute.
Want to be part of this conversation? Join our Dyson Sphere Discord server to dive into the future of compute and space-based infrastructure.
Energy Possibilities on the Final Frontier
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has already shown that we can get close to the sun—it’s currently orbiting nearer to our star than any previous human-made object. The energy per square meter is 600 times greater there than in Earth’s orbit. That’s 600 times the power for the same hardware! With thermophotovoltaics, a less developed type of solar panel than regular PV, we could capture this energy even more efficiently in these extreme conditions. TVP has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 85% and we need scientists focused here as the future of addressing humanity’s energy demands.
Space Infrastructure is Here (Almost)
Other companies are catching on to this vision too. Lumen Orbit, is planning low-Earth orbit data centers, where energy could be as cheap as 1 cent per kilowatt hour. And AstroForge is developing asteroid mining technology, making it possible to source resources from space, for space. The future is infrastructure is not on Earth.
Now, building close to the sun won’t be easy. We need about 30-60 km per second of Delta V to reach a stable orbit there, But thanks to reusable rockets like SpaceX’s Starship, we’re not far off. And existing railgun technology can work at the speeds needed to bring infrastructure from Earth orbit to the sun likely much more cheaply than a flotilla of chemical rockets. Starship can carry the resources from Earth to establish and supply our sun focused transport network.
A Call to Dream Big with Us
At Strong Compute, we’re here to dream bigger than the present allows, pushing the limits of compute to the edge of what’s possible—and beyond. We’re building a future where anyone can access the compute power they need, on demand, without limits. We’re starting here, on Earth, and the Dyson Sphere is where we’re headed.
So if you’re ready to be part of this journey, apply for a research grant, get early access to Strong Compute for your organization, join one of our monthly hackathons, and see what’s possible when compute has no friction.
Occupy Sol. 🫡