Chip scarcity assaults auto industry amid the worsening Nexperia and DRAM crisis
“Data centers have become cheaper. Output per NVIDIA cluster is up ~20x this year, and their margins are wide enough to cut prices 90 percent and still profit at 50 percent,” said Kydo, a researcher from Eigen Labs, the developer of the compute platform. “The market caught up to our price. We could go lower, but then most of you would earn even less [than] nothing.”
It’s estimated that someone running an M5 Pro Mac Mini with 64GB of Unified Memory could earn as much as $192 per month. This is the best-case scenario, though; the median earnings of the top 50 operators on Darkbloom’s leaderboard are about $159.86 per month. This translates to about $5.26 daily or $1,918.50 annually. However, if we account for Anthropic’s 77% token price drop, earnings will fall to a measly $36.77 per month, or about $1.23 per day.
AI token prices are falling so fast that they've even outpaced Moore’s Law , with some reports saying AI is becoming 50% cheaper every quarter and up to 13 times more affordable every year. News of companies blowing through their annual AI budgets in months has less to do with per-token price and more with the number of tokens, as agentic AI use outpaces token price drops. Aside from that, OpenRouter, Darkbloom’s primary client, has started prioritizing decode speed, quantization, and prefill speed, putting users without a top-of-the-line Max or Ultra Apple chip at a disadvantage.
Despite that, Darkbloom says it will not sit idly by and let some users lose out because of these changes. The network is analyzing model demand to advise members on which models are in higher demand right now. It’s also looking at other kinds of workload beyond inference, including distributed CI/CD jobs, improving network performance to better compete against other computer providers/aggregators, and finding other clients outside of OpenRouter.
Startups want to rent your idle gaming PC for AI tasks
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/firm-that-lets-you-rent-out-your-idle-mac-for-ai-inference-workloads-warns-of-plummeting-token-costs-darkbloom-network-sees-earnings-drop-to-usd1-23-a-day-as-anthropic-tokens-fall-77-percent#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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- Grab the award-winning Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer with AMS for $70 off
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have been the target of a spy plot through 'Chinese intelligence asset,' report claims
- NVIDIA Cosmos Opens New Tools to Train, Evaluate and Deploy World Models
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.