Salad Cloud
Distributed GPU cloud powered by idle consumer gaming hardware
Salad Cloud is profiled here as a LLM tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Short Intro: Salad Cloud is a GPU compute platform founded around 2018 by Bob Miles, a former Qantas aeronautical engineer who co-produced a twelve-part Netflix and National Geographic series, then bought salad.com from Hidden Valley Ranch and built a distributed compute network on top of consumer gaming PCs. Headquartered in Salt Lake City with $27.5M raised, the platform operates two tiers: a community pool of 450,000+ enrolled gaming PC nodes for high-volume stateless workloads priced as low as $0.02 per hour, and a secure data center tier with A100, L40S, and H100 NVL instances for compliance-sensitive deployments. CivitAI, the largest AI art model sharing platform, uses Salad for Stable Diffusion inference at scale.
Key Capabilities:
Community GPU pool of consumer gaming hardware across 11,000+ daily active GPUs
Secure data center tier with A100, L40S, and H100 NVL for enterprise and compliant workloads
Up to 90% cost savings compared to hyperscaler GPU pricing
Container deployment without node management, scaling across thousands of GPUs via the Salad portal
Distributed network spanning 450,000+ nodes across 180+ countries
Autoscaling replicas for high-volume stateless AI inference workloads
Flexible pricing with public rate calculator and sustained use discounts
Workload support for image generation, speech-to-text, computer vision, 3D rendering, and drug discovery simulation
WebSocket and streaming endpoint support
DevOps pipeline encryption and integrity tooling
Golem Network DePIN integration for decentralized compute experiments
Fortune 500 clients alongside AI startups on the same platform
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