SF Compute operates clusters without owning the GPUs

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 29:04

   Describe your stack. We do all the things a cloud does without being the cloud, as in we don't own the hardware. The reason why we don't own the hardware is because if we did, we would be able to manipulate the forwards market. So we have to be Switzerland. We have to be independent, which creates a lot of sort of strange things about the company. But in order to do physical settlement, you have to do site visits.

2. 29:30

   You have to visit the data center. You have to design the bill of materials and ensure that you have to basically do like supply chain consulting where you have relationships with different OEMs that ensure that things get delivered on time. then you have to do cluster architecture so you're sort of designing the cluster itself then you're rolling out racks or you're working with partners to roll out racks and supervising that then you're doing backplane management so you're taking over the PDUs and the switches and the DPUs and UFM and BMC and you're operating the whole harness around the nodes that you're selling when you say you as an SF compute employees yep wow So when you buy a node from a cloud, there's the bare metal.

3. 30:21

   But there's all this shit around the bare metal. And in order to make that bare metal node work, you have to operate everything else. Then we... Because I just like, traditionally the job of the data center is to extract some of this away from you. Yeah. We're the ones that do that. But you're not in the data center business. You're not in the sort of equinexes of the world. We're not in the data center business, sort of.

4. 30:48

   What we do work with is – so we offer supercomputing as a service. And what this means is folks come to us and say, I've got X, where X is – I've got X megawatts here. And maybe sometimes they mean I've got a data center that's – like I would like to turn into a GPU cluster. Like my options are I could sell the data center to somebody or I could become the cloud. And then we go to them and say, great, we will turn you into the cloud.

5. 31:18

   We're the supercomputing part. You're the data center part. Let's partner together. And then we will sell and I'll make money. Sometimes it's people who have something that could turn into a data center, in which case we're going to basically project manage that up to the layer. and then we will work with those folks to turn their powered land or whatever they have into a data center by working with partners and then we take over at the supercomputing part.

6. 31:46

   This requires us to have some sort of data center expertise in-house but we don't self-perform builds. So, yeah. Yeah, so it's somewhat modular because you have different scenarios you need to play under. Yeah, someone once described us as like Palantir for compute, because it's like each time it's this new rodeo, and we deeply partner with folks on both sides. And primarily the US? Primarily the US, but we operate around the world.