Chips for Humanity
Chips for Humanity is a nonprofit helping researchers outside the frontier labs get the compute their work needs.
The frontier labs put about 2% of their research compute into safety. For every $500 the labs spend on research compute, safety research outside the labs gets about $1.
Outside compute has fallen behind the labs’. Outside researchers wait longer for experiments and work on smaller models. That slows their feedback loops, rules out compute-heavy methods, and leads to false negatives: problems that only show up in bigger models go unseen.
Geodesic Research spent six months, and much of its senior staff’s time, getting one.
Contracts came in 1–3 years only, prices rose about 10% a month from May to August 2026, and offers were gone in 1–2 days.
The only intervention that removes this bottleneck is for a funder to establish (or back) an entity that owns compute contracts and allocates GPU time across their grantees.
A safety researcher outside the labs has about two GPUs, and up to eight at the best-funded teams. At Anthropic, the one lab whose public figures allow the sum, it is about 200. Much of the gap is large runs on big models, which outside researchers rarely get to do.
Our arithmetic on public figures from Anthropic, Epoch AI, Bloomberg, tax filings and fellowship budgets. Sources →
At OpenAI, researchers’ use of coding agents doubled every month this year (Epoch AI). Once agents run experiments too, researchers will need far more GPUs.
Our estimates; the 2027 paths are scenarios. Sources →
Demand for AI compute is outgrowing supply. Renting the newest chips costs about twice what it did a year ago; older chips cost the same.
AI Futures Project forecasters expect AI that can do an AI company’s coding between late 2027 and 2030. Compute that arrives a year late may be too late.
Data: AI Futures Project, Aug 2026. Sources →
We secure large amounts of high-end compute and pass it on at cost to safety research groups that need a lot of it quickly.
As funding grows, we’ll give compute to researchers for free, through a fair and open process for deciding who gets it.
We are an independent nonprofit, so funders can give specifically for compute. We will publish where it goes: which projects get compute, and how much.
Tell us what your project needs, and we’ll help you get it.
Compute is a growing share of safety grants. We help that money go further.
If you want to give compute to safety research, you can give it through us.
If you need compute for safety research, or have some to give, email us.