"The Airbnb of GPUs"… Data Alliance Lowers AI Costs with Distributed Infrastructure
Weaving together idle resources worldwide to cut compute costs — responding to the reshaping of an inference-centric AI market
At World IT Show (WIS) 2026, held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, Data Alliance introduced gcube, a distributed GPU-sharing service built on idle resources.
"Just as Airbnb shares accommodations, our service connects idle GPUs scattered around the world into one," said CEO Kwangbeom Lee. "It helps relieve the infrastructure cost burden and the GPU supply challenges that AI companies face."
Beyond price competitiveness alone, Data Alliance is concentrating its R&D capabilities on establishing technical credibility. "By precisely combining Tier 1, 2, and 3 resources of differing performance, we've achieved commercial-service-level stability," Lee emphasized. In recognition of this technical strength, the company won an Innovation Award in the AI category at CES 2026 this year.
According to the company, using gcube's Tier 3 resources can reduce costs by up to roughly 90% compared to conventional cloud services. In particular, under a model of partial use only when needed, universities and research institutions can cut costs by up to 98%, and B2C (business-to-consumer) service companies by up to 97%.
gcube connects and centrally manages not only the idle resources of cloud providers and data centers, but also consumer-grade GPUs in internet cafés (PC bangs) and personal PCs, all linked into a single network. "When you gather 600,000 idle GPUs from around the world, the computing throughput is about 300 times greater than a KRW 400 billion national AI data center," Lee noted.
Pointing to the AI market's shift from training toward inference, Lee added: "For inference workloads that require continuous computation, gcube's distributed network is even more efficient."
Data Alliance currently partners with Naver Cloud and Vietnam's FPT Cloud, among others, and is also preparing a carbon-credit business based on the reuse of idle resources. In addition, the company plans to pursue Series A funding in the second half of this year.
World IT Show (WIS) 2026 runs for three days, through the 24th.
Reporter Jiwon Lim, Industry News (jnews@kidd.co.kr)
Source: https://kidd.co.kr/news/245792