The Economics of Decentralized Compute: Building a New Market for Global Computing Power
Artificial intelligence, Web3, scientific research, gaming, and increasingly sophisticated applications all share one critical requirement: compute . For decades, computing power has largely been controlled by centralized cloud providers and hyperscale data centers. Companies rent servers, GPUs, and storage from a relatively small number of providers, while those providers manage the infrastructure, pricing, capacity, and geographic distribution. But a new economic model is emerging: decentralized compute . Instead of concentrating computing resources in a handful of massive data centers, decentralized compute networks connect independent hardware providers and make unused or underutilized computing capacity globally accessible. The technology is interesting—but the economics may be even more important. What Is Decentralized Compute? Decentralized compute is a model in which computing resources are supplied by a distributed network of independent participants rather than by a single ce...