A nonprofit organization funded by crypto billionaire Jeb McCaleb has acquired Nvidia AI chips worth $500 million. Voltage Park, a cloud computing AI organization, plans to use these chips to provide affordable AI computing services. Eric Park, the CEO of Voltage Park, revealed that they have acquired 24,000 Nvidia H100 chips.

The primary goal of creating Voltage Park is to mitigate the chip shortage's impact by offering cost-effective AI computing services to consumers for both short-term and long-term usage. "We believe the current machine learning ecosystem is broken," said Park.

Voltage Park intends to establish data centers based on these Nvidia AI chips in Texas, Virginia, and Washington, USA. Some of them are already operational, and the full deployment of the 24,000 Nvidia chips is expected by February 2024.

For context, McCaleb is a crypto billionaire who co-founded three major crypto companies: Mt. Gox, Ripple, and Stellar. Ripple is known for developing a blockchain with the cryptocurrency XRP, and its founder once possessed 20 billion XRP, valued at approximately $80 billion at its peak.

Voltage Park is wholly owned by a subsidiary of McCaleb's nonprofit organization, Navigation Fund. All profits generated will be directed towards Navigation, as reported by Reuters on Wednesday, November 1, 2023.

It's worth noting that the Nvidia H100 chip has been referred to as a "money-making machine" for Nvidia. This is because the chip is in high demand, often facing shortages, and Nvidia can profit significantly from each chip. Tae Kim, a technology writer at Barron, stated that Nvidia only spends $3,320 to produce an H100 chip, yet consumer prices for these chips range from $25,000 to $30,000. This estimation is based on calculations from the consulting firm Raymond James, which accounts for the production costs of the H100 chip, including the HBM memory chip embedded within it.