Sam Taggart
The rise of AI as the defining force in modern computing demands a fundamental shift in how we think about infrastructure. The reality is that the centralized model simply isn’t sustainable anymore. As AI systems scale in capability, their compute, storage, and networking demands are exploding. At the same time, concerns around surveillance, censorship, energy consumption, and concentration of power are reaching critical levels.
ThreeFold offers a radically different answer: a decentralized, sovereign, and sustainable infrastructure built for the age of intelligent machines. It is the foundational layer for a future where AI is owned, governed, and operated by everyone.
🔗The Structural Bias Toward Centralization in AI
Modern AI development is deeply centralized. Today’s most advanced models are created, hosted, and controlled by a small group of corporations with vast computational resources and privileged access to proprietary data. This isn’t mere conjecture by the way. It is the most obvious outcome of how modern machine learning works:
🔗Scale Rewards Capital
The most capable AI models are those trained on vast datasets, using enormous compute, for extended durations. That means:
- $100M+ training budgets
- Clusters of the latest NVIDIA enterprise grade GPUs
- Proprietary pre-training data pipelines
Only a handful of companies, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, can compete. Startups, researchers, and sovereign nations without this infrastructure are locked out of cutting-edge development.
🔗AIs Are Easier to Control Than Humans
Artificial intelligences are orders of magnitude easier to control than humans:
- Humans resist control through rights, unpredictability, and emotion.
- AIs have no such friction. Their environments are programmable. Their cognition can be monitored and shaped directly.
Owning AI infrastructure doesn’t just mean “owning compute,” it means governing cognition. This is why the question of who builds and owns the infrastructure for AI is a question of societal structure and potential freedom.
🔗Regulation Often Entrenches Power
Even well-meaning AI governance initiatives can entrench centralized players if access to model development, compute, or deployment is limited by regulatory red tape.
AI regulation can either reinforce centralization or counterbalance it. Policies that restrict open-source models, limit public access to compute, or impose vague safety mandates that only large firms can meet will drive further consolidation.
🔗AI Centralization is a Civilization Risk
The centralization trajectory that we are currently on has dire implications.
Without a course correction, we risk entering a world where a small elite controls a growing share of intelligence deployed not to empower individuals, but to surveil, manipulate, and extract.
Centralization has given these companies the ability to mass-produce aligned, intelligent agents at scale. This transforms how propaganda, surveillance, and even individual behavior manipulation can be conducted.
🔗Extreme Scenarios Are Plausible
- In authoritarian states, AI systems can monitor, evaluate, and punish dissent in real-time across all digital communication.
- In liberal democracies, well-funded actors could use adversarial inputs tailored to individuals’ cognitive patterns to shift beliefs subtly over time.
- In global markets, AI-powered monopolies won’t just win by being cheaper – they’ll win by being smarter, wiping out small businesses, local expertise, and cultural independence.
AI doesn’t just need new infrastructure. It needs the right kind of infrastructure.
We don’t need just faster chips. We need a different paradigm:
- Decentralized by Design: So no single actor controls the substrate of intelligence.
- Sovereign at Every Level: So individuals and communities own their models, data, and compute.
- Green and Sustainable: So we don’t trade intelligence for ecological collapse.
- Composable and Open: So innovation doesn’t rely on permission from gatekeepers.
This is exactly what ThreeFold delivers.
🔗ThreeFold’s Decentralized Approach
The ThreeFold Grid is a peer-to-peer compute and storage network spanning over 50 countries. Unlike cloud platforms built in centralized data centers, the Grid is powered by individual nodes run by small-scale infrastructure providers contributing capacity in exchange for tokens.
Here’s why it’s uniquely suited for AI:
🔗Decentralized Compute at the Edge
AI inference workloads, especially those requiring low latency, are increasingly moving to the edge. The ThreeFold Grid is inherently edge-native. It allows inference to happen where data is generated, reducing both latency and exposure.
🔗Sovereign AI Hosting with AIBox
ThreeFold’s AIBox lets users own and operate personal AI hardware, offering up to 80% cost savings versus cloud GPUs while providing total control over data and models. Each AIBox is dedicated to a single user, ensuring secure and consistent access to GPU resources.
Users can run fine-tuned models locally and earn by monetizing excess capacity.
🔗Privacy-First, Always-On Intelligence with 3AI
The 3AI assistant runs natively on the 3Phone, processing all data locally. No cloud, no spying. It learns your habits, manages your tasks, and connects securely to decentralized apps powered entirely by the ThreeFold Grid.
🔗Run AI Workloads Today with 3Nodes and Full VM Rentals
AIBox and 3AI are incredibly exciting innovations. They are not in production yet but they are a critical part of our next stage. However, you don’t need to wait to interact with ThreeFold.
ThreeFold’s existing 3Nodes and Dashboard already allow users to run full virtual machines with GPU acceleration, ideal for training or inference workloads.
You can:
- Rent a dedicated VM with AMD or NVIDIA GPUs and run any AI workload compatible with Linux
- Spin up environments for model training, inference, or fine-tuning with full data control (OpenWeb UI deployment is coming to the Dashboard as part of TF Grid 3.17)
- Take advantage of up to 50% discounts when renting a full dedicated 3Node for long-term use
🔗The Ideal Platform For Augmented Collective Intelligence
Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI) is the next evolution of the internet. In this phase we are not just connecting people, but amplifying our collective capacity to think, decide, and act. When people can run their own models, control their data, and contribute to shared knowledge, we get smarter together.
ThreeFold’s infrastructure is uniquely positioned to bring ACI to life. By providing a peer-to-peer cloud that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, it enables communities, researchers, creators, and sovereign nations to build intelligent systems together.
🔗Verifiability and Transparency
ThreeFold integrates blockchain primitives for auditable deployments and transparent governance. This makes it ideal for regulatory compliance without sacrificing openness or privacy.
🔗Built for AI, Not Repurposed for It
Unlike legacy infrastructure patched to support AI, ThreeFold was built from the ground up to enable distributed, compute-intensive workloads. Its composable architecture, GPU-ready fabric, and local-first design make it the ideal substrate for the AI era.
🔗Rebalancing the Scales: AI for the Many, Not the Few
In unfree societies, centralized AI systems are already being deployed for surveillance, censorship, and coercive control. Even in free nations, the combination of targeted data, powerful models, and cheap compute could enable sophisticated value-manipulation campaigns, individualized propaganda, or automated suppression of dissent.
We’ve already lived through the consequences of losing control over our data. An entire generation’s digital behavior was harvested, manipulated, and monetized. If we don’t act now, we risk losing something even more critical, our cognitive agency.
We lost the war on data. Let’s not lose the war on intelligence.
ThreeFold offers a defense. By enabling local AI processing, sovereign data ownership, and verifiable execution, it removes the infrastructure-level levers that centralized actors rely on for control. It redistributes power by making intelligent systems available to everyone, as a right.
🔗The Path Forward
The future of AI cannot be built on rented clouds, closed models, and opaque institutions. It must be co-owned, co-governed, and globally distributed. We don’t need another centralized alternative to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
We need something that Web3 promised ages ago, but failed to deliver so far.
We need a decentralized infra that’s live and open for everyone.
We need ThreeFold. AI needs ThreeFold.
