KONST, a Taiwanese compute-infrastructure startup, has closed a funding round of tens of millions of US dollars, backed by well-known Taiwanese energy, technology, and cybersecurity companies. The capital will fund the expansion of compute centers across Asia, North America, and Europe, and the company has set out to build 10 clean-energy, ESG-aligned compute centers within three years. This is a summary of a Chinese-language feature; the key points are below.
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From mining to AI compute. Co-founders Tsai Ming-chih (CEO) and Chang Yung-hsu (CMO) started with bitcoin mining in 2017, then pivoted to AI compute after the 2022 crypto downturn. They brought in a partner with years of experience at a major cloud provider to add the software layer, formally launched the company in January 2024, and now target small and midsize application-level customers that cannot afford their own high-end servers.
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Not just GPU rental. KONST positions Glows.ai as a development toolchain for orchestrating compute rather than a plain compute-rental service. Because it builds its own compute centers, cloud systems, and GPU management, the platform removes much of the friction in scheduling, storage, migration, and environment setup.
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Three signature features. Image ships pre-built environments and adapted models, so customers select a model instead of configuring an environment by hand; Snapshot pauses a project to stop billing for idle compute; and Tripods scales resources automatically to match real-time demand. Its hyper container virtualization delivers at least twice the compute efficiency of comparable services — for example, running a 70B Llama model on just two RTX 4090s.
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Pricing and reach. KONST bills by usage, with the RTX 4090 at US$0.65 per hour and the H100 at US$3.5 per hour. A 30-person team has drawn more than 100,000 registered customers across Europe, the Americas, and Asia through a product-led strategy — developer communities, hackathons, and channel partners. Each compute center costs around NT$30 million (US$1 million) to build.
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International expansion. The new funding will accelerate the buildout across Asia, North America, and Europe and support the development of clean-energy compute. KONST has built several supercomputing centers in Taiwan, with a facility in Texas under construction, and CEO Tsai has said the company plans a full push into the US market in 2025.
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