Unlocking the Power of Excess Computing with NodeShift
When the large cloud providers have excess compute capacity, they tend to discount it through programs like AWS’s and Azure’s spot instances. Any time a server idles, it isn’t making the company money, after all.
NodeShift aims to revolutionize this concept by providing developers with a single API to access excess computing, storage, and graphics acceleration from independent data center operators and decentralized web services like Akash and Filecoin.
Today, NodeShift announced that it has successfully raised $3.2 million in seed funding, led by Inovo.vc, with contributions from Notion Capital, 10X Founders, and Kestrel0x1. The company is also proud to have Epic Games as an angel investor.
Founded by Andrey Surkov and Mihai Mărcuță, NodeShift has a unique story of its inception. The two met while interning at Cisco in 2016. While Surkov stayed at Cisco and became involved in the world of cryptocurrency, Mărcuță went on to work with tech giants like Microsoft Azure, Twitter, and Epic Games in London. Despite their different paths, the two remained friends and ultimately came together to bring Surkov’s idea to life while accompanying a mutual friend to Turkey for a hair transplant. Surkov pitched the concept of a company that would make underutilized data center capacity available to developers, and the idea for NodeShift was born.
“A lot of data centers have spare capacity just sitting out there — about 10 to 20% of spare capacity — and there’s hundreds of data centers like this,” explained Mărcuță. “The price is very, very affordable. If you compare it to traditional cloud providers, we’re talking about prices that are 70 to 80% cheaper.”
NodeShift is committed to delivering significant cost savings to its users, promising to save over 70% on compute costs when compared to the big cloud providers. This includes access to sought-after Nvidia accelerators like the A100 GPUs at a significant discount. And while larger cloud vendors may not offer it, low-cost decentralized web services also provide access to high-end consumer-grade accelerators like the RTX 4090 gaming GPUs, at a fraction of the cost.
With his networking experience at Cisco and involvement in decentralized systems in the crypto world, Surkov became obsessed with the friction present in using decentralized compute. “I wanted to understand how I could fully host my DAP in a decentralized manner, and I soon realized there is a significant amount of friction that comes with that. It’s one thing to use fully decentralized storage, but compute is a whole other beast. And then when you add in the friction of using tokens for each cryptocurrency project just to fund infrastructure, it becomes overwhelming,” Surkov said.
This friction may explain why it is challenging to convince companies to use these decentralized services, even though they offer significant cost savings. In a business context, the process can be challenging and cumbersome.
Mărcuță acknowledged the importance of using Web3 and blockchain technologies while remaining realistic about their relevance. “We feel that Web3 and blockchains are often applied to projects where they aren’t necessary, purely for the sake of having them,” Mărcuță stated.
In addition to its partnerships with decentralized projects, NodeShift also collaborates with independent data center operators. The company ensures that developers have complete control over where their projects are located, down to the specific data center. These data centers are certified by the Uptime Institute and have all the necessary SOC 2 and ISO 27000 certifications expected by enterprise users. NodeShift also offers its customers a service level agreement (SLA), which would be challenging and costly to obtain in a Web3 context.
The company’s unique combination of traditional infrastructure and Web3 technologies enables developers to burst out their compute capacity as needed at a much lower cost, effectively turning it into a spot instance on NodeShift. Currently, NodeShift has access to an astonishing 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage through its data center partnerships.
In the near future, NodeShift plans to introduce a Kubernetes platform that will simplify the process of shifting workloads between these various resources as needed.
With this recent funding, the NodeShift team intends to continue building its supply and expanding its go-to-market efforts.
Competitors in the market include Germany-based Impossible Cloud, which primarily focuses on storage, and Salad, which specializes in AI/ML workloads on consumer-grade hardware.
