China: Computing power rental powers up in China.

Storyline Computing power rental powers up in China Inclusive and shareable computing power clusters are emerging in China to address an AI pain point: how to supply lots of compute power at affordable costs to small and medium sized businesses. Businesses like this one in Hangzhou that makes industrial robots. They need to continuously train their models. But insufficient GPU memory makes multi-tasking nearly impossible. He Feng, Deep Learning Algorithm Engineer, Hangzhou Linx Robot Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd.: "On a local server, it's often limited by the GPU's video memory. But with a cloud server, we can significantly increase the VRAM, allowing our multi-task model to run in parallel — cutting the processing time from over ten hours down to just a few hours." To get enough power to run their businesses, small and medium sized companies are renting power from so-called "compute power supermarkets." This market offers two types of rentable power: one for computing power and one for large model tokens. Jing Rongwei, Deputy General Manager, Zhejiang Computility Technology: "When renting compute power, you can pay by the hour — one GPU card, one hour. Or you can go with yearly or monthly packages. For big models, it’s usually charged by the token, mostly per million tokens. Right now, it’s just a few yuan per million tokens, and the price keeps going down." The head of one computing power supermarket says about 80 percent of their users are small and medium-sized enterprises and are in sectors like education, culture, e-commerce, and embodied intelligence. [Restrictions: No access Chinese mainland]