What's San Francisco Compute?

San Francisco Compute sells time on large-scale GPU clusters (thousands of GPUs) on contracts you can get out of. Normally, when you buy a large cluster, you're forced into a long-term agreement that puts your business at risk. We let you sign long-term contracts you can "exit", by selling back to someone else on our liquid market.

Unlike a reseller, we operate the clusters like a cloud provider, with our own virtualization and bare-metal stack.

The way we work with customers

SFC onboards only a few customers at a time, by signing an NDA, sitting down directly with your engineering team, proving out a pilot, aligning our roadmap to you so we can bring down your costs & keep you out of long-term contracts.

We've had a lot of success with this model and today operate thousands of chips that our customers can scale up and down with ~1hr average lead time.

The mission

We're building the company which will de-risk the largest infrastructure build‑out in history.

When people finance GPU clusters, the datacenters housing them, and the infrastructure powering them, they need "offtake" - meaning someone has signed a contract to lease the cluster for a period of time before it's even built.

Financing a GPU cluster is inherently risky, since margins are thin and volumes are huge. Lenders don't want to take on the risk that cluster developers can't repay their loan, and cluster developers really don't want to risk not selling their cluster. As a result, risk is offloaded to the customer using fixed‑price long‑term contracts.

If you don't mitigate this customer risk, there's a bubble. This isn't SaaS anymore - application layer companies sign multi‑year contracts for compute and inference, but sell to customers on monthly subscriptions. If you mess up a purchase, it's game over: a minor shift in your revenue growth rate might mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy. But what if companies could exit their contract by selling it back to the market?

Otherwise, as AI scales, compute only becomes available to folks who can effectively take on that risk. A 2‑person startup in a San Francisco Victorian can't realistically sign a 5‑year take or pay contract on $100m supercomputer. But they may be able to buy the month of liquidity that someone else sold back.

So that's what we make: a liquid market for GPU offtake.