This startup is helping tech giants and real estate developers find land for data centers—and using its own GPU cluster to do it

Acres founder Carter Malloy’s two daughters press their faces to a glass window at the back of the office, trying to see the humming machines their father has been raving about—two high‑end GPUs tucked into a dark corner.

Malloy bought those two machines from NVIDIA in 2024, and just recently ordered two more, which should arrive later this week. He’s also threading new cabling through the ceiling to plug the machines straight into the computers of his data science team, so they can train models directly on‑site instead of renting time in the cloud.

“Having it on‑prem is just a lot cheaper to train—and actually faster,” Malloy says. 

Acres may be a small startup of only about 70 people, but it is one of a growing number of niche data companies quietly assembling GPU clusters outside the walls of Big Tech, in a bet that owning their own compute will be a competitive edge. Andreessen Horowitz famously secured its own GPU cluster that it rents out to startups in exchange for equity. And individual startups including the video hosting startup Gumlet have said they are hosting their own hardware, too. This hardware can cost more than $25,000 per GPU, plus ongoing energy costs. During supply shortages like last year, it can be difficult for smaller companies to obtain them without months on waiting lists.

But to run a geospatial data intelligence company, Malloy says having their ...