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Illustration: Hilary B; Source: Argentum AI

Argentum AI Deep Dive: Building the World’s First Energy-Aware, Decentralized Compute Network

At Banyan Ventures, our conviction is simple: the next frontier of AI isn’t about bigger models — it’s about smarter, more efficient infrastructure.
That’s why Banyan AI Fund I led the pre-seed round for Argentum AI, and Banyan's Founder Sam Awrabi is proud to joining as an the first investor and first board advisory partner.

Argentum AI, founded by Dr. Clark Alexander and Andrew Sobko, is creating a decentralized, compute-agnostic marketplace designed to tackle what Alexander calls “the physical energy barriers of AI.”

Why Banyan Led

When we met Clark, his background alone stood out: a PhD in Mathematical Physics and Non-Commutative Geometry from Northwestern, time at Oak Ridge National Lab, and IEEE work on post-quantum cryptography. But what truly caught our attention was his first-principles thinking.

In his conversation with DL News, Clark put it plainly:

“The primary limitation of Large Language Models is a physical barrier, not a theoretical one.
A few years ago, I was at Oak Ridge National Lab when they were installing the world’s largest supercomputer.
The lead engineer told me they couldn’t build it twice as large simply because they couldn’t afford the electricity bill.”

That framing defines why Banyan led. Argentum AI isn’t just another GPU network — it’s a market mechanism for compute efficiency, addressing AI’s trillion-dollar energy problem through economics, not just engineering.

Rethinking Scale: From LLMs to SLMs

Clark continues in the interview:

“Large Language Models are, in most cases, overkill.
I prefer a model trained on relevant sources — a ‘WebMD’ Small Language Model that provides information about medical topics; I don’t need that same model to know the history of Indonesia.”

This philosophy aligns directly with Banyan’s AI-Native thesis: the future belongs to specialized, efficient, domain-specific intelligence — not monolithic, power-hungry models. Argentum AI’s platform will enable these smaller, purpose-built models to run on the right hardware at the right cost.

A Market for Compute — Run by AI

Argentum AI’s marketplace lets an AI agent act as a scheduler, matching compute jobs to available providers based on speed, price, and efficiency.

“A user might not need an H100 GPU right now; perhaps they just want the job completed by tomorrow morning,”
Clark explains.
“They could run it overnight on several CPUs for a much lower cost.”

It’s a self-optimizing economy of compute, where supply, demand, and energy constraints meet in a dynamic market.

Tackling AI’s Energy Crisis

Energy efficiency isn’t an afterthought — it’s the core.

“Python is very energy inefficient because it was built as a teaching language,” Clark notes.
“Training a model in an efficient language like Rust can be six orders of magnitude, or a million times, more efficient in bits per kilowatt-hour.”

Argentum AI introduces tiered pricing that makes inefficient languages like Python more expensive to run — creating direct economic incentives for sustainable compute.

For Banyan, this approach exemplifies AI-Native infrastructure thinking: solving systemic constraints through aligned incentives, not brute force.

Security for the Quantum Era

Argentum AI is also designing one of the world’s first post-quantum-secure decentralized compute networks, using lattice-based cryptography.

“We aim to be one of, if not the only, post-quantum-secure blockchains,” says Clark.
“We plan to use lattice-based encryption to secure our platform for the future.”

This combination — decentralized compute + quantum-resilient security — represents exactly the kind of long-horizon innovation Banyan seeks to fund early.

Looking Ahead

When asked what success looks like in a year, Clark’s answer captured Banyan’s conviction perfectly:

“Within one year, I want to see users running molecular simulations, financial pricing, complex optimizations, and AI training for both language and vision models at various scales.
Success for me is witnessing these real-world scientific and industrial compute tasks being completed on Argentum AI.”

That’s the vision we backed — a decentralized infrastructure layer where scientific, financial, and AI workloads coexist efficiently, powered by market-driven compute.

Why It Matters

At Banyan Ventures, we led this round because Argentum AI represents what we call AI-Native Infrastructure — technology designed with AI at its core, built from physics-level principles, and aligned with how intelligence truly scales.

Compute is the new oil — and Argentum AI is building the refinery.

We’re proud to partner with Dr. Clark Alexander, Andrew Sobko, and the Argentum team to make that future real.

Read the Full Interview

📖 DL News: A Conversation with Dr. Clark Alexander, Co-Founder & Head of AI at Argentum AI