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Darkbloom pays Mac owners $120-200/month for idle Apple Silicon AI inference
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Eigen Labs' Darkbloom distributed inference network has become a paid provider on OpenRouter, paying Apple Silicon Mac owners an estimated $120-$200 per month on average to run AI inference on idle hardware.
This creates a monetization path for underutilized Apple Silicon machines outside traditional cloud infrastructure, paying individuals rather than frontier labs. The privacy architecture, which uses Secure Enclave decryption and hardened Swift processes, attempts to solve the trust problem inherent in running someone else's inference prompts on your hardware.
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Darkbloom has 250 machines online, over 900 providers total, and reports close to 4.5B tokens served with $102K ARR.
Apple Silicon Mac owners earn an estimated $120-$200 per month on average, with electricity costs around $2 per month.
The network routes inference through a Go-based coordinator in an AMD SEV-SNP Confidential VM, decrypts jobs within Secure Enclave, and runs inference in a single hardened Swift process using MLX on the Apple Silicon GPU.
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