Vast.ai
Vast.ai is a two-sided GPU compute marketplace connecting AI researchers, developers, startups, and enterprises with distributed GPU capacity from independent hosts and data centers. Its stated mission is to organize, optimize, and orient the world's computation and democratize access to AI compute.
At a Glance
- AI researchers and universities
- Independent developers
- AI startups
- Enterprises and regulated industries
- +2 more
AI Tools by Vast.ai
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Vast.ai
GPU Cloud Marketplace for Developers
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Latest News
Vast.ai achieves SOC 2 Type II certification
Vast.ai publishes guidance for deploying LLM inference using Vast.ai Serverless
Vast.ai named among fastest-growing vendors by Ramp and Brex; reports seven-figure monthly revenue and 13x revenue growth
Vast.ai launches Startup Program with $2,500 in GPU credits
Products & Services
On-demand marketplace for renting GPUs from distributed independent hosts and data centers, with one-click templates and API/CLI deployment.
Isolated GPU infrastructure from vetted data-center partners, with private networking, data-control features, and enterprise compliance support.
Dedicated multi-GPU environments for large-scale training and production workloads.
Autoscaling, pay-per-use GPU inference through an API, with predictive optimization and multiple worker groups per endpoint.
Market Position
Vast.ai positions itself as a lower-cost, open, two-sided GPU marketplace rather than a centralized hyperscaler: supply comes from independent hosts and data centers, prices are transparent and market-driven, and capacity can be provisioned through code. It competes with RunPod, Lambda, Modal, Together AI, and hyperscalers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, emphasizing lower prices, broader heterogeneous supply, per-second billing, and no long-term contract for many workloads.
Leadership
Founders
Jake Cannell
ML engineer, GPU programmer, and AI theorist; published essays on LessWrong about compute scaling and the future of AI before founding Vast.ai. He is the company's CEO.
Christian Horne
Builder and LessWrong contributor (lahwran) who shared Cannell's compute-scaling thesis; co-developed the platform and helped incorporate Vast.ai.
Executive Team
Jake Cannell
CEO & Co-founder
ML engineer, GPU programmer, and AI theorist; founder of Vast.ai and author of LessWrong essays on compute scaling and AI.
Travis Cannell
COO
Joined Vast.ai in April 2022 as its first employee; oversees operations, partnerships, and growth and built the operational infrastructure for scaling the platform.
Founding Story
Jake Cannell and Christian Horne incorporated Vast.ai on June 28, 2016 after concluding that intelligence would be driven by compute and that control of compute should not be concentrated among a few hyperscalers. They saw large amounts of underutilized GPU hardware in gaming rigs, mining farms, research labs, and small data centers, and set out to create a two-sided market that would let owners monetize it while making compute affordable to researchers and developers.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Marketplace and cloud-compute usage revenue from GPU rentals billed by the second, including on-demand, interruptible, reserved, serverless, dedicated-cluster, and enterprise Secure Cloud workloads. Vast.ai connects providers and compute buyers and prices capacity through supply and demand; enterprise customers can also receive custom volume pricing and reserved contracts.
Pricing Tiers
Real-time rates vary by GPU type, region, and supply/demand; the pricing page listed examples such as RTX 5090 from $0.39/hour and H100 SXM from $1.73/hour.
Lower-cost capacity that may be interrupted.
Capacity reservation for longer-term or critical workloads; enterprise volume discounts are available.
Autoscaling inference pricing uses the underlying GPU market and supports on-demand, interruptible, and reserved pricing.
Target Markets
- AI researchers and universities
- Independent developers
- AI startups
- Enterprises and regulated industries
- GPU owners, hobbyists, research labs, and data centers
- Companies building AI agents and production inference systems
- AI model training and fine-tuning
- LLM and text generation
- AI agents
- Image and video generation
- Serverless model inference
- Batch data processing
- CHAI
- Bosch
- Cognition
- Inria