Shadow, the Paris-based cloud PC and gaming provider, has launched Blade (blade.sh), a service that sells time on its 12,000-strong GPU fleet to developers, startups and enterprises running AI workloads. The idea rests on a simple pattern: consumer demand for cloud gaming peaks in the evenings and at weekends, which leaves capacity idle the rest of the time.
Shadow says Blade's dynamic pricing follows available capacity and comes in 25% to 40% below the main market players for equivalent GPUs, with no charge for data egress or ancillary services. Developers can schedule work that is not time-sensitive, such as batch processing or synthetic data generation, for cheaper off-peak periods.
Two services, one live and one due in November
Blade Models is available now. It gives API access to around 20 AI models covering text and code, vision, optical character recognition, image generation and audio transcription, billed on use with no infrastructure to deploy. AI Fabric follows in November and will let developers deploy their own models, code or applications on Blade, either from a Python environment or by importing a model from Hugging Face, with costs tracked in real time.
Blade concentrates on inference, running models in production, and offers an OpenAI-compatible API. It also integrates Staan, the web search API built by Qwant and Ecosia through their joint venture, European Search Perspective, so models can ground answers in current web data. Customers who want sovereign hosting can run workloads on infrastructure in Europe operated by OVHcloud.
Shadow and Qwant sit in the same group, Synfonium, founded by Octave and Miroslaw Klaba, and the release presents Blade and Staan as an example of what the two can build together. Chief executive Boris Lecoeur framed the launch as a European supply question.
“We've been running GPUs at scale for more than a decade. With Blade, we're making that infrastructure and expertise available to the companies building AI in Europe, so they can focus on developing products and bringing them to market faster,” said Boris Lecoeur, CEO of Shadow.
For Shadow, which has sold personal cloud PCs since 2016, Blade is a new business-to-business line built on hardware it already runs rather than a replacement for the consumer service.
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