What is Salad's business model?
Salad sells compute on Chefs' idle GPUs to cloud customers, keeps mining as a backup, and earns a margin on rewards.
Salad makes money in two ways, and neither involves selling your data.
SaladCloud customers
SaladCloud sells GPU compute to companies that need it: Molecular Dynamics, AI inference, image and video generation, data processing and similar container jobs. Those jobs run on Chefs' idle GPUs at a fraction of what the big cloud providers charge, and the customers pay Salad for the compute. Salad passes the bulk of that to the Chefs whose machines ran the job, as Salad Balance. Container jobs are the core of the business and the main source of earnings for Chefs.
SaladCloud also has other product lines such as CPU containers, the AI Gateway, or Bandwidth Sharing which function along the same principle.
Customer demand goes up and down, so not every machine has a job all the time. When yours does not, it falls back to mining as a backup workload, which earns less but keeps something coming in.
Rewards
The rewards in the Storefront - game codes, gift cards, subscriptions and so on - are bought at discount or wholesale prices. Salad passes on much of that saving but marks the redemption price up to earn a margin.
For more on where earnings come from, see How does my machine earn Salad Balance?.
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