Eigen Labs, a Seattle-based startup, is inviting owners of Apple Silicon Macs to rent out their idle computing power to earn passive income through Darkbloom, a distributed AI inference network that recently became a paid provider on OpenRouter. The move matters because it offers a novel way for ordinary Mac owners to monetise underused hardware while helping power open-weight AI models, positioning itself as an alternative to costly frontier-lab data centres.

Darkbloom, which began as an experiment in April, now has more than 900 registered providers and has processed over 42 million inference requests, generating around $102,000 in annual recurring revenue from 4.5 billion tokens served. Eigen Labs estimates participants can earn between $120 and $200 a month on average, with annual earnings potentially ranging from $192 to $4,983, minus roughly $2 monthly in electricity costs. The system routes requests through a Go-based coordinator running in a confidential virtual machine, with inference performed locally on providers' Macs using Apple's MLX framework and hardened security measures designed to prevent access to prompt data, similar in principle to Apple's Private Cloud Compute.