IN FOCUS
In today’s newsletter, we look at:
- How GMI Cloud struck gold by pivoting from crypto to AI cloud biz
- How AI agents will make 2025 their year
Welcome to the first edition of The Prompt for 2025! Delivered every fortnight, this free newsletter breaks down the biggest stories and trends in AI. Get all our content, including The Prompt, by registering for a Tech in Asia account. Alternatively, sign up here if you just want to receive this newsletter.
Hi there,
Whenever I interview a genAI startup, I always ask if they’re running their AI models in the cloud. The answer can tell me a lot.
If they’re not, it means they – or their investors – have money. Lots of it. An Nvidia H100 GPU can set a company back about US$30,000, and you’re going to need more than one.
OpenAI uses an estimated 720,000 of these chips to run its large language models, which would cost a total of about US$21.6 billion.
So it’s not surprising that many startups turn to the more affordable option of the cloud.
This brings us to our Big Story for the week on GMI Cloud, a GPU cloud services provider, where startups go to train and run their AI models when they can’t afford the price of chips.
I talk to Alex Yeh, the founder of GMI Cloud, a US company with data centers in Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan.
Yeh didn’t start his company because of the boom in genAI. He and a partner originally built a GPU farm for Bitcoin mining, and Yeh, who has a background in finance, was only an investor. Their one mistake was basing the company in China.
After the country’s 2024 Bitcoin mining ban, Yeh relocated to the US and tapped into the growing AI GPU demand. His company now owns “thousands” of Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Is he worried about a bubble? Nope. Yeh sees himself as a man selling shovels in a gold rush.
When you’re done reading about his golden shovels, you can also read our Hot Take for the week: the rise of AI agents in 2025.
— Scott
THE BIG STORY
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