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Does anyone know anything about buying a financialized version of compute, like one would buy shares in a company? I don't mean buying a token that gives you a claim on some given amount of server time but buying something that means you get the net profit from a certain set of physical processors, without actually buying the chips and getting them delivered to you.
I know you can rent compute for a given task, it's all in some great big server somewhere. But can you buy it? Say you thought that there was going to be even more of an AI boom, could you buy some compute and then rent it out, making a profit and selling it onto someone else? Could you short compute if you thought it was all overhyped?
I suppose compute is not like houses in that it gets obsolete fairly quickly, that might complicate investment. I know people don't usually buy shares in trucks or a C&C machine, they buy shares in companies.
I think you managed to reinvent cloud computing haha.
No, really, you can't own compute (without renting) if you don't own a computer, and if you're trying to sell it for a profit, then you're competing with Azure and AWS.
Frankly speaking, as an individual, you're SOL, businesses like this live and die off scale, not to mention the issues with obsolescence.
But no, the fungible "compute" you envision doesn't exist outside buying shares of companies providing it. Crypto wouldn't work, since most of it is proof of work for already spent compute.
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