Kaiser was the whistleblower in the Cambridge Analytica case, the British political consulting firm that allegedly collected data of millions of Facebook users, profiled them for targeting users during the 2016 US presidential elections.
Kaiser said her experience with Cambridge Analytica was one of the driving forces behind the focus on confidential computing.
Demand for Alpha Compute’s services is high in India as the country is one of the biggest markets for Telegram, the messaging service that is one of its clients, she said. “We want to focus on low latency so that if 100 million users in India want to use Telegram’s AI services, they should be able to without any delay,” she said.
Alpha Compute is working with Telegram to roll out Cocoon AI, the latter’s AI inference platform on the blockchain network TON. AI inference refers to the process that lets AI models generate answers post training.
Confidential GPU-as-a-service has security features that let companies encrypt data and isolate AI workloads even during processing. Alpha Compute works with firms such as Dell, Supermicro, Nvidia and Lenovo for hardware with end-to-end encryption so that no third-party companies, including model makers, get access to the data.
This comes at a time when demand for GPUs is on the rise amid the AI arms race and the market is seeing entry of new firms such as Alpha Compute. Last month, Alpha Compute announced that it is rebranding from AlphaTON Capital, a digital asset treasury platform, to focus on confidential GPU-as-a-service. In April, US-based sneakers company AllBirds announced that it is pivoting to GPU-as-a-service company under NewBird AI. CoreWeave and Nebius are two large existing players.
While there is competition, Kaiser pointed out that demand for compute is huge and there is enough room for everyone. But she agreed that the current geopolitical situation is posing a challenge.
Alpha Compute was planning to roll out data centres in the UAE, but had to pull back amid the West Asia conflict. “It was too risky as a public company to send compute to places that are in an active war zone. We are focused on rolling out more compute in countries such as the US, Canada, Europe and India,” she said.
