Darkbloom warns Mac owners renting out idle compute for AI inference to expect lower payouts as token prices fall

Darkbloom, the Eigen Labs network that pays Apple Silicon Mac owners to serve AI inference jobs routed through OpenRouter, has told its roughly 800 providers that earnings have been low and are unlikely to recover soon. Eigen Labs researcher Kydo said data centers have become cheaper, with output per Nvidia cluster up about 20x this year, and that the market has caught up to Darkbloom's prices. The median of the top 50 providers on its leaderboard earns about $5.26 a day, but Anthropic's per-million-token price on Ramp's index fell 77% from $2.65 in May to $0.62 in October, which Tom's Hardware estimates could cut that to about $1.23 a day. Darkbloom says it is steering providers toward higher-demand models and exploring other workloads.