t pays to be the middleman.

At least that’s what Evan Conrad, CEO of The San Francisco Compute Company, better known as SF Compute, has found to be true. The startup, which helps GPU cluster vendors secure “offtake,” claims it has experienced rapid growth as AI developers clamber for more compute without wanting to get locked into expensive, long-term contracts.

So how does it work? To put it simply, Conrad said, if you go to get a loan to fund a GPU cluster, the lender needs to know that the organizations you’re selling that cluster to will be able to pay for it. This creates a market where GPU vendors want to lock customers into lengthy contracts, also known as offtake.

That’s where SF Compute comes in, said Conrad. The company secures offtake for those vendors by sourcing customers for GPU clusters, allowing those customers to “buy long contracts, and … sell back portions of it.” Every time someone sells that compute, Conrad’s firm takes a fee.

“Something like a trillion dollars is flowing into compute,” said Conrad. “And if you don't have secure offtake, that means there's a bubble.”

SF Compute was born out of necessity, Conrad said, having been “backed into it” while searching for short-term compute for a previous AI startup he was creating. Unable to find ways to rent the power he needed in the short term, his then-company purchased a GPU cluster, using what they needed and “subleasing” the rest of the resources, he said.

According to Conrad, SF Compute has struck a chord among AI developers, claiming that the company’s revenue has grown 13 times the size it was in July. Though Conrad was close-lipped about customers, he noted that “people are spending on the order of millions of dollars a month.” 

“There is more money than has ever been deployed into any infrastructure project in the history of the world, flowing into compute at the moment,” Conrad noted.

Compute is more valuable now than ever – and traditional cloud offerings may not be cutting it. The search for a solution is evident in the growing popularity of neoclouds, such as Nebius, CoreWeave, Nscale and Lambda, which have, in total, inked more than $33 billion in deals with Microsoft. But as the costs of compute grow higher and higher, SF Compute’s success could signal a desire among smaller AI labs for more affordable alternatives.