New computing power paradigm in the Web3 era: Interpreting the underlying reasons for the popularity of the depin track
Perhaps it can be traced back to the 1940s. With the invention of computers, we began to enter an era driven by data and computing. Data and computing power have become new factors of production, and their value is - undoubtedly - being more widely and firmly recognized. At present, as the trend of artificial intelligence (AI) has swept everything, the value of data and computing power has been subverted again by new technologies, so that we have to re-evaluate them - in a way that will inevitably lead to value-added. We can get a glimpse of the prosperity of the computing power market through NVIDIA's market performance. As the global leader in AI computing power, NVIDIA achieved unexpected growth in the latest fiscal quarter, and its total market value is approaching the trillion US dollar mark. On May 25, the company released its first quarter financial report for fiscal year 2024, showing that the company achieved quarterly revenue of US$7.192 billion, a month-on-month increase of 19%, GAAP net profit of US$2.043 billion, a month-on-month increase of 44%, and gross profit margin of 64.6%. Among them, the quarterly revenue of data centers reached a record high of US$4.28 billion, and the development of generative AI accelerated, driving the exponential growth of global computing demand; a16z said that the recent progress of artificial intelligence is incredible and has the power to save the world (see Golden Finance's previous report "a16z founder's 10,000-word long article: Why AI will save the world"). However, building AI systems requires the deployment of greater computing power to train and reason about today's largest and most powerful models. This means that large technology companies have an advantage over startups in the competition to extract value from artificial intelligence, thanks to privileged access to computing power and economies of scale of large data centers. In order to compete on a fair playing field, startups also need to be able to affordably use their own large-scale computing power. We are trying to find a new technology to achieve - in short - provide high-quality, secure computing services at a relatively lower price. Whether it is a centralized large-scale public cloud platform, such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, or a decentralized cloud computing service provider, such as Akash, Flux, Gensyn, Theta, etc., as a computing power provider, they have been given higher value with the popularity of AIGC.According to Google Cloud's report, 85% of the surveyed companies choose to integrate their business with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) or natural language processing (NLP), and expect to achieve a 25% increase in productivity by 2026. As early as October 2021, Roblox, the first stock in the Metaverse, suffered a large-scale shutdown of its internal system due to a failure in its cloud infrastructure. It took three days to resume operations, resulting in a loss of $15 million in revenue and a market value of $1.5 billion. Whether it is a public cloud computing service provider based on AWS or a private cloud infrastructure like Roblox, there are centralization defects. Therefore, creating a decentralized cloud computing service that guarantees reliability with highly distributed computing nodes and a strong total computing power has huge market potential in today's growing computing power value and in the foreseeable future.