Crypto Billionaire Jed McCaleb Funds Voltage Park AI Organization With Nvidia Chip Investment

JAKARTA - Crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb is funding a non-profit organization that buys around US$500 million (Rp7.9 trillion) of Nvidia's advanced chips. They plan to lease computing capacity to companies for artificial intelligence (AI) projects.

The AI cloud computing organization, called Voltage Park, has 24,000 Nvidia H100 chips, Voltage Park CEO Eric Park said in an interview with Reuters.

The operation plans to offer long-term and short-term low-term AI computing to help address AI chip shortages.

"We believe that the current ecosystem for machine learning is broken," Park said, quoted by VOI from Reuters.

Voltage Park plans to set up Nvidia's AI chip clusters in Texas, Virginia and Washington. Several chips are already running, and the plan is to fully launch the 24,000 Nvidia chips around February.

Following the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI last year, Nvidia's demand for advanced AI silicon surged as chip hunting businesses to drive their AI ambitions.

Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and a number of startups are also selling competing AI chips and are also in great demand.

McCaleb amassed a fortune as founder of three well-known crypto companies: Mt. Gox, Ripple, and Stellar. Ripple developed a blockchain with a cryptocurrency called XRP, and the founders received 20 billion XRP, which is at its peak worth nearly 80 billion US dollars (IDR 1,273 quadrillion).

Voltage Park, based in San Mateo, California, is a subsidiary of the Navigation Fund, a nonprofit company owned by McCaleb. Any profit Voltage gets will be sent to Navigacy. McCaleb does not operate or sit on the board of directors of both non-profit and Voltage organizations.