Shadeform operates as a marketplace for GPU compute rather than a direct provider, owning no GPUs for themselves. Unlike other marketplaces, Shadeform has a lean team and only $2 million in funding, and focuses strictly on their software and brokering deals. Their platform offers a transparent view of available GPU instances, uniquely identifying the underlying provider for each machine, such as Verda (formerly Datacrunch), Lambda, Voltage Park, Hydra Host, Digital Ocean and Nebius. This transparency extends to surfacing compliance information like SOC2 Type II and HIPAA certifications.
Source: Hovering over the Nebius icon to check it’s stack of compliance certifications on the Shadeform console
In fact, as of our testing, Shadeform is providing access to GPUs from 23 different providers, the most we have seen on any marketplace.
Interestingly, Shadeform’s primary business has transformed, with them now entering into the wholesale bare-metal market as a broker. This means that a significant portion of their revenue comes via the negotiation and structuring of large-scale cluster deployments for their clients, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region (Taiwan, Japan, India). The Shadeform website has become a valuable discovery tool for this purpose, and is often the first place neoclouds have their GPUs appear publicly. Shadeform also appears to be the only partner currently in place for NVIDIA’s Brev offering, which we describe later in this article.
With all that said, without a comprehensive Slurm or Kubernetes offering that we can test, no monitoring dashboards, and no way to do active/passive health checks on the underlying provider’s machines, we think it will be difficult for Shadeform to move beyond the bronze category. We look forward to testing cluster products and finding ways to evaluate the brokering services in the future.