Theta Labs Announces Michigan State University Will Be Adopting Its EdgeCloud Platform for AI Research

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 20, 2025 – Theta Labs, a global leader in decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media, and entertainment

Michigan State University Adopts Theta EdgeCloud for AI Research

Theta Labs, a pioneer in decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media, and entertainment, today announced that Michigan State University (MSU) will join University of Oregon (UO) as the second US academia customer to adopt Theta EdgeCloud for AI research. MSU’s Secure and Intelligent Things (SEIT) Lab, led by Associate Professor Qiben Yan, will leverage Theta’s advanced decentralized GPU infrastructure to drive innovation in AI, cybersecurity, and distributed systems.

MSU is a major Tier 1 research institution, adding a new dimension to Theta Labs’ academic collaborations in the US. As Theta expands its US cloud-based GPU infrastructure with locations in California, Texas and the Midwest, the company will also release the Beta of its fully hybrid cloud-edge computing platform in June 2025, which will incorporate an edge network of over 30,000 edge nodes operated by community members globally. The US and North America account for nearly one-third of these nodes, providing significant synergy to US-based customers.

Professor Qiben Yan is the director of MSU’s Secure and Intelligent Things (SEIT) Lab, which specializes in IoT security, AI privacy, blockchain resilience, and cybersecurity. His lab conducts cutting-edge research on safeguarding connected devices, systems, and networks from advanced cyber threats, and his work has been featured in top conferences (USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE TIFS) and projects that have earned prestigious funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The SEIT Lab focuses on developing secure, intelligent systems for IoT and AI applications, with an emphasis on distributed systems, federated learning, and blockchain-powered platforms. Some of their recent achievements include an NSF-funded project on adversarially robust AI for speech recognition and groundbreaking research on secure transaction frameworks for smart contracts. Prof. Yan's leadership has positioned the SEIT Lab as a hub for innovative solutions in cybersecurity and decentralized computing.

An overview of the ClearAI system, showcasing the voice conversion module for creating parallel datasets, the predictive model for style transfer, and speech restoration to enhance hypophonic speech quality and intelligibility.

Theta EdgeCloud will provide the SEIT Lab with a decentralized cloud platform that enables efficient training and deployment of AI models. EdgeCloud reduces the time required to spin up GPU resources by up to 5x compared to traditional cloud providers, accelerating research in secure AI, federated learning, and blockchain-powered systems.

This partnership strengthens Theta’s growing academic network, which includes top-tier universities in the United States, China and South Korea. These collaborations underscore Theta’s commitment to supporting academic research tackling complex challenges in media, healthcare, bioinformatics, and finance.

Quotes

Professor Qiben Yan:

“Theta has gotten significant customer traction in Asia with some of the top South Korean universities like KAIST and Seoul National. They’re our respected peers in the academic circle and we’re excited to have SEIT Lab join Theta EdgeCloud’s platform. We believe that EdgeCloud can help us scale various AI projects that require high-performance computing cost efficiently. We think in the long-term this will help us push the boundaries of decentralized technology as we expand research in secure, intelligent systems for IoT and AI applications.”

Mitch Liu, co-founder and CEO of Theta Labs:

“Thrilled to welcome Michigan State University and SEIT Lab to Theta EdgeCloud. Professor Qiben Yan’s lab joins University of Oregon and other US university labs to leverage EdgeCloud for computational intensive AI research. Theta is already the de-facto leader in decentralized cloud GPU computing in Asia with 8 of the top 10 South Korea universities as customers. We expect US academia to come aboard and adopt EdgeCloud aggressively in 2025.”

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About Theta Labs

Theta Labs is the leading provider of decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media and entertainment powered by a global network of 30,000 distributed edge nodes and a native blockchain. Backed by Samsung, Sony, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Creative Artists Agency, Theta is among the top 10 DePIN blockchains by market capitalization on Coingecko and top AI tokens on Binance.com, Recently launched Theta EdgeCloud is the first hybrid cloud-edge computing AI platform with over 80 PetaFLOPS of on-demand distributed GPU compute power. Theta’s enterprise validator and governance council is composed of global market leaders, including Google, Samsung, CAA, and Binance.

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