Shares of the bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure provider Hive Digital Technologies (HIVE) surged by nearly 25% on Monday to around the $5.20 level, their highest level in more than seven months, after the company showcased research conducted by a Columbia University team using its GPU cluster in Paraguay.
According to a company release, researchers based in New York trained neural networks remotely on HIVE's infrastructure in Asunción, Paraguay, studying ways to make large language models more efficient. The research has been submitted to the NeurIPS conference, one of the biggest gatherings for AI research, which will be held in December.
HIVE said the study found its Nvidia A40 GPUs delivered performance that was comparable to newer systems for certain workloads, which Executive Chairman Frank Holmes described as "proof of concept" for intercontinental AI training.
This builds on a project first unveiled in March, when HIVE launched its Paraguay cluster as an early testing ground for running AI training jobs over long distances. At the time, the company said Columbia researchers were using the facility to benchmark latency, throughput, and distributed training performance while it evaluated high-performance computing in the country.
