It has been an incredibly long and arduous journey.
Decades in the making. More trials, failures, growth, and gratitude than I could ever properly put into words. All to breathe life into what began as an absolutely insane idea: high-powered creative production accessible to everyone, everywhere in the world, on any device, even when you are stranded on a marginal 4G connection in the remote jungles of Indonesia.
But that all leads up to this week.
Spark Cloud Studio is now live for invitational beta.
What’s live
We are opening with a waitlist of nearly 4,500 people, and a platform that is finally beginning to look like the thing we always imagined.
Cutting-edge NVIDIA workstations starting at less than $1/hour. Infinite, fully-private file storage cheaper than Google Drive or Dropbox. The beginnings of truly on-demand creative software thanks to our partners at Adobe, Autodesk, and SideFX. Fully scalable compute that can churn through most renders or training jobs in a fraction of the time of a traditional farm.
Workstations can go from 8 to 192 CPUs at a moment’s notice, with the option of a crazy amount of RAM and up to eight 24GB NVIDIA GPUs.
High-speed storage expands and contracts dynamically as you need it. Collaboration across a dozen time zones and half as many continents is built right in. You can spin everything up and down as needed, even hibernating your entire studio with no recurring costs when uncertainty rears its ugly head.
That last part matters.
Production is rarely predictable. Teams grow, shrink, pause, restart, relocate, and change direction. Infrastructure should be able to move with that reality, not punish it.
Production from anywhere
Run any Windows app on your Mac or Linux machine. Work in UE5, Houdini, and more from your iPad, no joke, just like you have an insanely powerful workstation sitting in front of you.
Even while cruising at 40,000 feet or watching volcanic eruptions from a remote island somewhere.
We have full support for uncompressed 4:4:4 color, mounting camera mags, SD cards and external storage, Wacom tablets, control surfaces and most other peripherals.
The anywhere production platform we always dreamed about is finally real.
Zero investment
No upfront investment. Scale to the needs of the moment. Use the machine you need when you need it, then shut it down when you do not.
That has always been the point.
Not another heavy infrastructure burden for creative teams to carry. Not another giant hardware bet that may or may not match the next project. Just the power to make the thing in front of you, wherever you are, with the machine the work actually needs.
Thank you
There are too many people to thank properly here, and too many fingerprints on this journey to name without leaving someone important out.
But Spark only exists because a lot of people believed, challenged, helped, endured, advised, tested, rebuilt, and kept going when it would have been much easier not to.
The anywhere production platform we dreamed about for years is now in the world.
This is only the beginning.
— Walt Jones, Founder
