Open ownership is fundamental to scaling open source. A few corporations simply don't have the capacity to scale like distributed networks do.
We stand at the threshold of humanity's largest infrastructure buildout—$5.2 trillion through 2030 for AI—compute will flow like water and electricity, abundant and accessible to everyone. Project Stargate, announced in January 2025, is one major contributor to this buildout. It's a $500B joint venture led by OpenAI and SoftBank with partners including like Oracle, Nvidia, ARM, and Microsoft, to build a nationwide network of AI-focused data centers. Stargate's grand vision is great – for a closed network of AI companies, its vendors and its banks who will make their margin. Access, control and even participation in this new abundance is very much limited to this closed group.
This scale at which data, money, and intelligence move requires a new way to think about how we govern these projects. We propose Silicon Network and other distributed networks as a kind of OpenStargate, which introduces compute abundance and its gains not just to those with deal flow, but to anyone who wants to own their piece of this global scale infrastructure expansion.
"Compute abundance means every person becomes a creator, not just a consumer. When computational power flows as freely as information, a researcher in Lagos can train breakthrough models alongside a startup in Detroit, while communities worldwide collaborate to solve local problems with global intelligence. It's about unlocking billions of minds to build, discover, and innovate together—transforming compute from a scarce resource into humanity's shared thinking infrastructure." — Dylan Rose, CTO, Silicon.net
"Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly." - Vitalik Buterin
Stargate is one of the most ambitious, nation-state level projects of the 21st century. Still, it’s unclear how Stargate's $500B deal is even structured. Like its models, it’s completely locked down. The money flows through abstract committees, with opaque valuations that artificially constrain what could be humanity's largest collaborative infrastructure project. If you aren’t in Stargate, you are left with a small set of options, lenders, banks, collateral that are only open 9-5, but our compute markets must run 24/7.
The paradox resolves when we realize that the world's largest infrastructure projects succeed through distributed participation, not centralized control. Tokenized infrastructure assets can tap into global capital markets 24/7, enable community governance that scales with network effects, and create the transparency and liquidity necessary to coordinate a truly global-scale AI infrastructure buildout. Instead of $500B controlled by committees, we unlock $1T+ through worldwide participation where every stakeholder can contribute capital, expertise, and resources while maintaining liquid ownership stakes.
The distributed compute revolution isn't theoretical—it's happening now with measurable results across four key areas.
Better marketplaces are delivering dramatic cost savings, with Akash Network achieving $742K in Q4 2024 revenue and 144% quarter-over-quarter growth while offering H100s at $1.46 per hour compared to $2.99-$9.98 on traditional clouds. RunPod demonstrated similar momentum with 10x revenue growth in 2024, pricing H100s at $2.79 per hour versus AWS's $12.29—a 77% savings that extends up to 85% across major cloud providers.
Distributed training has achieved breakthrough performance through innovations like Nous Research's DisTrO technology, which reduces inter-GPU communication by 10,000x and successfully trained a 40B parameter model on 20 trillion tokens. Prime Intellect's INTELLECT-1 project proved global coordination works by training across 112 H100 GPUs distributed across 5 countries. The commercial validation is clear: $50M Series A funding for Nous Research and $20.5M for Prime Intellect mean that these emerging systems are here to stay. Here’s a video of Sequoia’s Dan Roberts discussing the potential of decentralized RL.
At scale, distributed inference is processing real workloads daily. Salad Technologies operates across 450,000+ GPU providers in 190+ countries, generating $10.4M in 2024 revenue, while Kuzco's Inference coordinates 8,500 active nodes to deliver 90% cost reductions versus traditional providers. These networks handle substantial volumes—10 million images daily and over 100,000 daily inference requests—proving distributed systems can serve production workloads reliably.
Bitcoin mining brought millions of entrepreneurs to setup high performance setups at all scales. This infra worked out very well for struggling Bitcoin miners: Core Scientific projects $10.2B in AI revenue over 12 years, and Core Weave started as an Ethereum Miner. There are entrepreneurs and builders all over the world who can already tap into 24/7 markets.
The path to compute abundance lies in tokenizing three distinct market segments that together represent >$1 trillion in opportunity. Even without deploying new compute there’s almost $250B in underutilized CapEx, $500B in near term expansion, and $180B in small/medium datacenters and at home planned expansions seeking better financing, and grassroots individual contributors—each with unique advantages that can be aggregated across distributed networks.
Instant liquidity beats 10-year lock-ups. DAO consensus beats corporate boards. Antifragile networks beat single points of failure. Real-time transparency beats black box financing.
Crypto enables more liquidity, better price discovery, and eliminates committee bottlenecks. Open source + crypto grows harder and faster, creating more monetization opportunities across the board.
The New Infrastructure Stack:
Decentralized training and inference unlock:
Assets, utilization, loans, collateral—everything becomes liquid and tradable. Traditional players remain but operate within a 24/7 tokenized economy with instant settlement and always-on liquidity markets.
Phase 1: Foundation Building
Phase 2: Network Effects
Phase 3: Global Governance
The Perfect Storm Convergence: AI Infrastructure Explosion × DeFi Maturity × Fairness Demand = RIGHT NOW
Growth Pattern: 7.5x value increase every 3 years through exponential network effects and viral community adoption
Total Journey: From 5,000 operators and $10B to 250,000+ operators and $947B in under a decade
Join Silicon Network and help us tokenize the world's AI infrastructure before centralized models lock out community ownership forever.
OpenStargate is a $1T distributed network where anyone can own a piece of humanity's thinking machines instead of renting access from Big Tech. Open ownership is fundamental to scaling open source because distributed networks can coordinate resources and capital at scales that no corporation can match. The choice is binary: accept permanent dependence on centralized AI infrastructure, or help create a future where intelligence flows as freely as electricity—abundant, accessible, and owned by everyone.