Darkbloom, Eigen Labs' network for renting out your idle Mac to run AI, just told its providers the quiet part: "Earnings have been low."
About 800 Macs serve inference jobs routed in from OpenRouter, mostly for a few cents to a few dollars a day, per The Register. The best case on paper is $192 a month for a 64 GB M5 Pro Mac mini running flat out, 24/7.
Data centers got cheaper and AI token prices kept falling. Eigen Labs researcher Kydo, to providers: "The market caught up to our price. We could go lower, but then most of you would earn even less nothing." Plan B: steer Macs to in-demand models, test CI/CD jobs, court high-end Mac Studio clusters.
No crypto token here, payouts go through Stripe. Idle-hardware economics deflated anyway.
Source: The Register