Making up to $200 a month by renting his Mac to AI: two months later, the dream comes crashing down

Launched in April by the American company Eigen Labs, Darkbloom offers Apple Silicon Mac owners the opportunity to put their machine’s graphics processor to work serving AI models in exchange for compensation. Requests come through OpenRouter, a gateway that routes developers’ requests to different model providers, and the Mac’s owner pockets all the earnings generated by the computation. In August, Eigen Labs estimated this income at an average of between $120 and $200 per month, an estimate that French testers were casting doubt on, while one of its own researchers lowered the estimates again this week in a message addressed to participants.

How much does a Mac rented out to AI really earn?

In his message, researcher Kydo celebrates the network reaching the milestone of one trillion tokens processed, these fragments of text that serve as a unit of account for AI, before admitting that “the earnings have been low.” “For most providers, I don’t expect this to recover any time soon,” he adds.

The network has around 800 participants, who earn from a few cents to a few dollars per day. At the top of the rankings, the median of the top 50 reaches $5.26 per day, or nearly $160 per month. Eigen Labs estimates the maximum earnings of a 64 GB Mac mini M5 Pro at $192 per month, provided it runs at full tilt day and night on a highly sought-after model.

The price of tokens would have fallen by 54% since May, and Kydo points to data centers, which have become much cheaper to run: “Output per Nvidia cluster has increased roughly twentyfold this year, and their margins are large enough to cut prices by 90% while remaining profitable at 50%.” Darkbloom, which had promised AI twice as cheap as that offered by the major providers, has lost that advantage: “The market has caught up with our pricing,” says the researcher. It remains possible to cut rates further, he acknowledges, but most players would then earn even less.

OpenRouter would also give greater weight to response speed and the level of model compression than to price when routing requests. For Macs without a Max or Ultra chip, Kydo warns that inference “will not be worth running.”

And what does this Mac cost to run in electricity?

At the regulated rate, a kilowatt-hour costs about 20 cents on the Base option. A Mac mini M4 Pro, whose consumption can rise to 140 watts, therefore uses about 2.8 cents per hour of intensive computing, or 67 cents per day if it runs at full power without interruption. Darkbloom itself puts the cost of electricity for an Apple Silicon Mac at 1 to 3 US cents per hour.

At full capacity, the Mac mini M5 Pro cited as an example by Eigen Labs would generate at most 27 cents per hour, far more than the cost of electricity for a comparable machine. With earnings ranging from a few cents to a few dollars per day, most of the Macs on the network therefore operate far below this level. Either their owners do not leave them running continuously, or requests are lacking: in both cases, the electricity bill remains modest, but so does the revenue.

Eigen Labs is now looking for other avenues: directing participants toward the most in-demand models, or running tests and compilations for developers. The company is also betting on clusters of Mac Studios interconnected via Thunderbolt, with each machine able to accommodate up to 512 GB of memory. “The next step will be a battle, and I expect many machines to drop out and Slack to become quieter,” writes Kydo.

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Source: The Register