GPUs, or graphic processing units, have become increasingly difficult to acquire as tech giants like OpenAI and Meta purchase mountains of them to power A.I. models. Amid an ongoing chip shortage, a crop of startups are stepping up to increase access to the highly sought-after A.I. chips—by renting them out.

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The GPU rental market is part of a niche, existing industry known as GPU-as-a-service where chip owners use an online marketplace to sell compute power to clients over fixed periods of time through the cloud. Typically, companies turn to major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—which collectively hold a 63 percent market share of the global cloud computing market—to run A.I. workloads on their on-premise data centers.

GPU-as-as-service, however, provides a more decentralized approach. Providers in that space partner with data centers and GPU owners globally to rent their clusters of chips to clients whenever the need arises. Renting computer power allows organizations with tight budgets, such as startups and academic institutions, access to high-performance GPUs for specific projects, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

“GPU-as-a-service has significantly leveled the playing field in A.I. and high-performance computing,” Bader told Observer. “Instead of making substantial upfront investments in hardware that quickly depreciates and becomes obsolete, companies can now access GPU power on-demand.”

Even as supply chain constraints around GPUs start to ease, the rental market continues to grow. The GPU-as-a-service market, valued at $3.79 billion as of 2023, is expected to grow 21.5 percent annually to $12.26 billion by 2030 as the demand for advanced data analytics, like running machine learning algorithms, increases, according to data from Grand View Research.

Some startups in the GPU rental space have seen demand........

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