Hofvarpnir Studios

Hofvarpnir Studios is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Bridgeport, California, incorporated in 2021 and granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in February 2022. It was co-founded by Shauna Kravec (President and CEO) and Nova DasSarma (Treasurer and Co-Founder), with Tom Brown serving as a Director. The organization's name is drawn from Norse mythology. The core mission is to bridge the gap between AI safety academics and the high-performance computing resources they need. Hofvarpnir designs and maintains GPU clusters that support a wide variety of machine learning workloads, including fine-tuning large language models such as GPT-3 and compute-intensive reinforcement learning jobs. The cluster is shared infrastructure, serving dozens of independent researchers across partner institutions. Hofvarpnir's primary academic partners are the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at UC Berkeley and Jacob Steinhardt's lab at UC Berkeley. The organization has also supported researchers at UT Austin, MILA (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms), and Redwood Research. The organization received a single major grant of $1,443,540 from Open Philanthropy in March 2022, intended as a 36-month grant to create and maintain the compute cluster. Financial filings show revenues of $1,443,540 in 2022 (the grant), followed by much lower revenues of approximately $60,000 in 2023 and $67,000 in 2024, while annual operating expenses have remained around $450,000-$470,000 per year. As of the most recent 990 filing (2024), total assets were approximately $572,000 with no liabilities. All three board members and officers received $0 compensation. The organization operates at a deficit and its financial runway appears limited based on publicly available filings.