The bottleneck in artificial intelligence is no longer imagination. It is compute, power and price. Andrew Sobko, a serial entrepreneur and chief executive of Argentum AI, argues that demand is now growing faster than the infrastructure that supplies it, and that the current market structure leaves too much capacity stranded and too much pricing power concentrated.
He points to the scale of the numbers being discussed publicly. “In a recent interview, Elon Musk said he believes the industry needs an additional 20 million GPUs,” Sobko said. In parallel, he described a single large customer he is speaking with that, in its own planning, “needs 15 million GPUs in the next two years”. His conclusion is blunt. “The demand continues to double and triple every quarter,” he said. “The infrastructure is simply not there.”
Argentum AI is his attempt to meet that shortage with a different model. The company is building a decentralised marketplace for high performance compute, designed to aggregate GPU supply globally and allocate it through market pricing rather than fixed cloud tariffs. “We built a flexible spot market,” he said. “Companies can access compute immediately, within seconds.”
The commercial argument starts with price. Sobko sees hyperscaler pricing as rigid and, in many cases, detached from the realities of supply and demand. “The clouds have their price,” he said. “People either take it or leave it.”
His aim is to make pricing more responsive by allowing buyers to bid for capacity and providers to compete to supply it. In practice, he describes this as a system that “creates the correct price”, particularly for startups and emerging market builders that cannot justify premium cloud costs.
The technical argument is about resilience and control. Sobko contrasts a centralised model, where an outage can cascade, with a distributed marketplace where disruption is contained. “In our case, we are decentralised, so distributed,” he said. “A local problem stays a local problem and does not take the whole network down.”
That emphasis on fragmentation also feeds into his pitch to more sensitive buyers. He said that, from the beginning, Argentum focused on security and sovereignty, including the ability to route workloads based on where data can and cannot go. “One of our first focuses was to create a marketplace for cross border compute and to focus on very strong security, including zero knowledge,” he said. “We are already working with some government agencies, and they want to understand which data centres are used, so we can match those requests.”
For Sobko, trust is not only a cryptographic problem. It is also physical. He describes an enterprise pedigree built around diligence and operational discipline. “We serve hundreds of Fortune 500 companies,” he said, and he credits early traction to a focus on credibility. “We doubled down on security, not only software security, but also physical security, and we provided the kind of physical diligence customers could trust.”
The supply side of Argentum is built to be pragmatic rather than ideological. Sobko says providers are not hobbyists running spare machines at home. The company has been onboarding professional operators, with a particular focus on two pools of latent infrastructure: data centres and Bitcoin miners.
“We started partnering with real data centres,” he said, and then described a shift in recent conversations. Where earlier discussions focused on talent and models, he now hears a different constraint. “Now it is all about power,” he said.
Bitcoin miners, he argues, are a shortcut to scale because they already control the scarce part of the equation: powered data centre infrastructure. Argentum sources GPUs and places them with miners that can host and operate them immediately. “We signed up hundreds of Bitcoin miners that already had infrastructure and power in place,” Sobko said. “We give them access to GPUs and they commit capacity into our marketplace.”
The numbers he cites are designed to demonstrate momentum. He said the company can now stand up substantial clusters quickly, including new equipment. “We can stand up 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 GPUs,” he said. “Some of them are the newest GPUs on the market.”
He also points to the scale of redistribution already under way. “We are aware of 5,000 GPUs distributed to Bitcoin miners globally,” he said, describing this as a route to cheaper compute for startups.
One of his sharper observations is that the industry wastes usable equipment because the frontier keeps moving. Large AI labs and hyperscalers upgrade aggressively, even though older GPUs remain capable. Argentum’s marketplace is designed to give that hardware a second life.
“The large hyperscalers use the newest equipment,” Sobko said. “They replace older GPUs with new ones in the same infrastructure and they put the old versions aside.” He argues that those older units are still valuable. “There are still great GPUs,” he said. “I always say this. It is still a Lamborghini.”
This is where tokenisation enters the story, less as marketing and more as coordination. Sobko is candid that many enterprise buyers remain cautious about crypto, but he believes blockchain rails can make cross border coordination faster and cleaner, particularly when incentives must be aligned across jurisdictions and counterparties.
“A lot of companies get scared when they hear crypto,” he said. “So we educate them on the benefits, including security.” He then described the practical role of tokens in mobilising supply. “Using tokens as an incentive is for global scale,” he said, referencing the challenge of persuading large infrastructure holders to contribute capacity into a shared marketplace.
Payments are part of the same infrastructure logic. Sobko says some large transactions are already happening in stablecoins, driven by speed and immediacy rather than ideology. “They prefer sending us USDT or USDC,” he said. “Some of those transactions are really large.”
His ambition for Argentum is explicit. He describes it as infrastructure building at scale, and his language leans on older models of expansion and durability. “Argentum is about building infrastructure, almost like the scope of an empire,” he said, adding that his company name is associated with silver.
The roadmap he gave is aggressive. He said the company has built the platform with limited capital and a development heavy team, and that the next phase is rapid network growth. “We were able to do it with a very small capital raise, and by building a really good product,” he said.
Then he put a number on the scale he is targeting. “We are aiming for one million GPUs,” he said, which he believes would make Argentum one of the largest compute networks in the market. The timeline he discussed was 2027.
This is where Sobko’s thesis comes back to first principles. If demand continues to compound, the winners will be those that unlock supply fastest, at the lowest effective cost, without sacrificing trust. He is betting that the market for compute will start to look more like a market, and less like a catalogue.
In his view, the stakes are not limited to the largest labs. If cheaper, reliable compute can be sourced globally, then innovation becomes less dependent on location and balance sheet. He frames this as an enabling layer for the next generation of companies. “That is how you drive innovation globally,” he said. “That is how you let smaller startups participate.”
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