Compute Local
Circuit-board map of North Carolina with a pin on Durham

DBCo, Durham, NC · Dec 5–6, 2026

ComputeLocal

Run it yourself.

A conference for people who run AI inference and bitcoin hashrate on hardware they own, and who build the local communities around it.

Get a ticketApply to speak
Days
2
Room
1
Cloud dependencies
0

Three threads

One room. Three kinds of people who already talk to each other.

Inference

Models that run on the box under your desk.

  • Local LLMs and open weights, quantized to fit what you own
  • Agents that work without an API key
  • Homelab GPUs, DGX Sparks, Macs, and what to actually buy
  • Serving, evals, and keeping the thing up

Hashrate

Bitcoin mining at the scale of a garage.

  • Open hardware and software: Bitaxe, Ember One, Libre Board, Mujina, Hydrapool
  • Solo mining and pleb pools
  • Hashrate heating: use every watt twice. Heat the house or the water and get a bitcoin rebate

Community

How a meetup becomes something that lasts.

  • Starting a community from zero
  • Socratic seminars that stay technical
  • Collaboration, meeting of minds, growing a movement
  • Sponsors, venues, and doing it without a company behind you

What you leave with

Things you can do on Monday.

  1. A local model serving real work, on your hardware, with numbers on how fast.
  2. A hashboard or an ASIC you understand down to the firmware.
  3. A shortlist of what to buy next and what to skip.
  4. A working plan for running a meetup in your own city.
  5. People to call when the power supply smells wrong.
  6. Zero slides about the future of intelligence.

Lineup

Lineup TBA.

We are filling the slots with people who run things, not people who talk about running things. Apply to speak.

Venue

Durham Bottling Company

Durham, NC. DBCo is a coworking space in Durham and the home of the Triangle Hashlab meetups. Enough power, enough tables, and people who are used to us bringing hardware in.

What to bring

  • A laptop.
  • A Bitaxe or a Mac mini if you want to show something running.
  • Patience for the power strip. There will be tables, outlets, and wifi.
  • Something you built that half works.

Tickets

Get a badge.

One badge, both days: Saturday December 5 and Sunday December 6, 2026. Get your early bird ticket before prices go up.

Get a ticket

Backers

Back the show.

The venue, the power, and the coffee cost money. We keep tickets cheap by finding a few backers who want to be in the room with these people.

Sponsor Compute Local

Community

This grew out of meetups. It should make more of them.

Bring your city.

The Community thread is for anyone who wants to run a room like this at home. Come with your city and what you want to build there. Leave with the things that work: how to find a venue that wants you, how to keep the technical bar high and the door open, how to turn a first meetup into a monthly one, and how to grow it without a company behind you.

This is how it is starting here: a new monthly builders night in Durham where people bring the box they are working on and show what it does.

Poster for the AI Builders Meetup, Triangle Hashlab, Durham NC
Triangle Hashlab's monthly AI Builders Meetup, Durham.

FAQ

Questions.

Do I need to be an expert?
No. You need to be curious and willing to plug something in. Every talk is aimed at people who do this at home, not at a lab.
Which side is this for, AI or bitcoin?
Both, on purpose. The people running a GPU under the desk and the people running a hashboard in the garage have the same problems: power, heat, noise, software that fights you, and a market that wants you to rent instead of own.
Will there be recordings?
Talks are recorded and posted afterward. Hallway conversations are not.
Can I bring hardware?
Small stuff, yes: a Bitaxe, a Mac mini, a dev board. There are tables with power strips and wifi, not a hardware lab. Nothing high-wattage, and do not leave anything you would miss unattended. If a real hardware crowd shows up this year, next year gets a proper bench.
Is there a hackathon?
Not a formal one. Bring your laptop, find a table, and the lightning demo slots are for whatever you got working.
Why Durham?
Durham Bottling Company is a bitcoin-friendly space, and we want to grow it. Triangle BitDevs has been meeting in the area for years, Triangle Hashlab just started, and DBCo gave both a home. This is the weekend it gets bigger.