Tech companies requiring access to GPU workloads have a new option at their disposal following Salad.com’s decision to partner with Web3 specialist Golem Network. The collaboration will bring Web2 workloads into the Web3 arena, taking advantage of Salad’s existing customer base and Golem’s distributed compute model.
Web3 Compute With a Side of Salad
Like all partnerships – particularly those that bridge the Web2-Web3 divide – the first task to be undertaken by Salad and Golem is to establish the technical capabilities of the arrangement. Once the teams’ respective engineers are confident that the integration is operating smoothly and capable of matching demand, it will then be scaled up and fully rolled out.
Should it prove as successful as hoped, the arrangement should benefit all parties. For Salad, it provides additional bandwidth, enabling it to meet the ever-growing demands for GPU compute from its enterprise clients. The design of Golem Network’s infrastructure means that the computational resources available are flexible and should ensure that Salad clients don’t hit a GPU “ceiling” during peak times.
For Golem, meanwhile, it’s a coup to have partnered with a major B2E player in the form of Salad.com. The partnership will provide a live and very public demonstration of what Golem’s Web3 infrastructure is capable of delivering. In the process, it further burnishes the credentials of the DePIN sector at large, which has quietly grown into the backbone for global resource allocation and remuneration, aided by Web3 technologies such as blockchain and tokenization.
Centralized Cloud Meets Decentralized Devices
Like most GPU providers, Salad currently utilized centralized cloud services to supply the infrastructure its customers rely on for their computational needs. The decision to partner with Golem, therefore, represents a radical shift in Salad’s business model, even if the user experience should remain unchanged: Salad clients will still tap into GPU resources in the same manner as usual, but behind the scenes, the workflow will be very different.
As an exploratory partnership, Salad isn’t planning to offload all its GPU demands to Golem at this point in time, it should be noted. Nevertheless, the move provides further evidence of the way the industry is moving as rising demand for AI workloads prompts Web2 businesses to look to distributed models that can take the strain.
Two Worlds That Work as One
Salad’s decision to partner with an established Web3 infra provider in Golem Network may appear to have come out of the blue, but the latter has actually known to the former for some time. Salad CEO Bob Miles professes to have first read the Golem whitepaper in 2017, and now that the network has come of age, is eager to test its capabilities. And there will be plenty to test, from decentralized marketplace setup to tokenization, though the Golem SDK should at least make the integration itself relatively straightforward.
Despite Golem having been on Salad’s radar for a while, Salad.com began seriously evaluating the capabilities of numerous DePIN protocols in 2025 before settling on Golem. According to Salad CTO Kyle Dodson, “The architecture provided by Golem, connecting compute requestors and compute providers via a decentralized protocol, has significant overlap with how Salad’s platform operates today.” It will still necessitate a change in how Salad’s GPU provision works, albeit one that taps into the many synergies between the two partners.
Both entities specialize in supplying GPU workloads for use cases such as AI inference and 3D rendering. It’s business as usual then, but business now as partners spanning Web2 and Web3 respectively.
