Why AI Startups Will Disappear Without Compute Markets — Evan Conrad, San Francisco Compute

Evan Conrad explains how San Francisco Compute went from an AI lab forced to sublease its own GPU cluster to an operator of supercomputers and a market for compute. He lays out the chain of risks facing new labs and inference companies, from sold-out capacity and oversized deposits to late, broken clusters and unpredictable demand, and argues that these form one credit-driven risk problem that a working compute market must solve.