A tough week for the AI trade on Wall Street.
Palantir closed higher Thursday, but it's still down double digits on the week amid concerns over sky-high valuations.
But many tech analysts may believe this pullback is inconsequential as AI spend continues to grow by the billions.
Now as the AI race heats up, growth is outpacing the power grid, and this is setting the stage for the rise of decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DPEN.
Es create networks of distributed energy resources such as solar panels, batteries, and EVs.
AI algorithms optimize the usage and efficiency of these resources to match supply and demand in real time.
Joining me to weigh in this morning is Trevor Harry Jones, who's the board member of the Render Network Foundation.
Good morning, Trevor.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So first, take us through the strain the AI race is putting on the power grid.
Uh, good morning.
Thanks, Remi.
Uh, good to be here.
So, specifically on the AI side, you know, we're in the middle of a global AI arms race.
The amount of dollars spent in centralized data centers is now almost bigger than what the US spends on office construction.
It's up 7 7X since 2022, and we're still very early on in the AI adoption era.
Uh, to win the race, we're gonna need to tap into every available resource and to reduce costs.
There are millions of idle consumer GPUs just waiting as AI architecture now evolves to unlock them.
You know, it's very early, but DPI is projected to be a $3.5 trillion market by 2030.
And Trevor, for the layperson out there who may have heard of the term deepen, but they're not quite sure what it is.
Can you expand on this and also its use case.
Of course.
So DPIN is an acronym for decentralized physical infrastructure.
Essentially, it's the gig economy for air for infrastructure.
Deepen solves real world problems for services people use every day, like generating maps or providing wireless access or compute.
And really by eliminating the barriers to participation, Deepin greatly increases the availability and reduces the cost for valuable services.
So when you think about rendering, Uh, we connect unused graphics cards from home computers and data centers to creators and studios across the globe, and it's really a win-win.
Creators access affordable, scalable, compute, while contributors generate idle, generate earnings from hardware that would otherwise sit idle.
And naturally my next question to you is why do you think this market is set to explode?
Well, really, coming in on the, the first point that um there's an absolute shortage of resources and in this race, we need to use absolutely every resource.
So, number one, it's, it's on the consumer demand side, but also, you know, the, the model that Deepin brings. is really mass participation and scale.
And with that mass participation and scale, you get better competition and reduced cost.
And I think we're really on the cusp of that, seeing these real world examples emerge and them starting to grow and evolve towards that multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
Yeah, and Trevor, when we're talking about artificial intelligence, we keep hearing about AI's grid problem and the strain that it's putting on energy across the globe.
So how is Din actually helping with this grid problem?
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge part of Din is by being distributed, we can leverage cheaper off-peak power usage and we can distribute that energy load across the globe.
So it isn't just restricted to one centralized data center.
So you have the the resilience provided by that redundancy across the globe.
And you have the, the, uh, spread energy costs that can be leveraged in, um, yeah, renewable or or other low-cost energy uh regions, um, yeah, in an efficient manner.
Yeah, and for people who may not be familiar with a decentralized compute, how does it actually fit in?
Well, you know, a great example is, is what we do on the rendering front.
You know, essentially, we, we render, um, a different video frame on a different node across the globe.
So we're, we're able to do large scale Hollywood productions in parallel at a fraction of the time.
And cost, you know what it's resulted in is some of the largest stages Hollywood productions, large scale immersive displays like the Las Vegas sphere, Grammy winning content production, games, and now AI all in a distributed cheaper, cheaper, more affordable manner.
And finally, Trevor, before I let you go, what do you think is the future of spatial computing and why?
You know, we're really excited about the direction of spatial and immersive.
You know, we just announced we're sponsoring a 3 month immersive 3D art display in New York.
It's going to be featuring 16 amazing artists, and I can't wait for the public to see what they've created using the render network.
But really beyond that, I think AI is about to unlock a whole new wave of creators on the immersive and 3D front.
It's, it's a really exciting time to be involved in really the intersection of AI, art, and crypto.
Yeah, and you just mentioned that immersive exhibit, but we've been seeing those types of events as well as exhibits around the world, not just in New York City.
So what other innovations are on the horizon that some of our viewers out there could expect, not just going into your end but also beyond?
Yeah, well, I think we're seeing an absolute evolution in displays.
You know, the Vision Pro was really a start as we look to Mehta's plans for the year, we're expecting more and more XR type.
Yeah, displays to hit the market, and I think that's where it gets really exciting for immersive because it becomes more 3D and opens up a whole lot of opportunities that are there in how these these productions are created but can be converted into absolutely different immersive experiences.
You know, our vision is ultimately to get to the holodeck in Star Trek.
So we want to have that lifelike real time experience at your fingertips.
OK, Trevor, well, we will have to leave it there but thank you so much for joining us this morning and have a great weekend.
Thank you, Remy.
