Highrise & Impala API Onboarding: Expanding Compute Access for Future Caribbean Builders

Future Caribbean hosted a Highrise & Impala API Onboarding Session to introduce builders participating in the Agentic AI Buildathon to additional compute and digital infrastructure resources available across the ecosystem.

Hosted by Lily Dash, the session brought together Alejandro Lopez from Highrise and Bar Yochai from Impala, connecting Future Caribbean teams directly with the infrastructure providers supporting their projects.

A major focus of the session was the compute access being made available to selected teams. Future Caribbean confirmed that selected teams had been allocated Highrise compute, while encouraging the wider builder community to join the session and learn about the technology even if they had not received Highrise access.

Infrastructure for the Agentic AI Buildathon

The onboarding session was designed to help teams understand the infrastructure available to them and resolve questions around access.

At the beginning of the call, Lily noted that Future Caribbean was actively working through builder accounts and ensuring selected teams received their Highrise resources. She also encouraged anyone who had not yet received expected access to identify themselves so the team could follow up.

Although Highrise compute was allocated to a defined group of teams, the session was intentionally opened to the broader Future Caribbean community.

The reasoning was simple: infrastructure is a critical part of building serious AI applications, and understanding the available platforms can help teams make better architectural decisions even when they ultimately use another resource within the buildathon ecosystem.

Introducing Highrise

Alejandro Lopez opened the Highrise portion of the session by explaining that understanding Highrise first requires understanding the infrastructure business behind it.

He introduced Hut 8 as Highrise's parent company and explained its origins in Bitcoin mining.

Bitcoin mining requires access to substantial amounts of energy, computing equipment, data-center capacity, and supporting infrastructure. Over time, according to Alejandro, the company recognized that one of the most valuable assets underlying that business was not simply Bitcoin mining itself — it was access to digital infrastructure at scale.

That realization became part of a broader repositioning of the company and provides important context for Highrise.

From Bitcoin mining to digital infrastructure

The Highrise story reflects a wider shift happening across the technology industry.

Infrastructure originally developed for highly compute-intensive workloads can increasingly support the rapidly growing requirements of artificial intelligence.

AI developers need access to compute. They need environments capable of supporting model inference, agents, applications, APIs, data processing, and increasingly complex development workloads.

Alejandro's introduction positioned Highrise within this transition: an infrastructure company emerging from an organization that already understood what it meant to operate substantial digital infrastructure at scale.

For Future Caribbean builders, that infrastructure becomes particularly relevant as projects move beyond prototypes and begin requiring more substantial computing resources.

Highrise and Impala working together

The onboarding session was designed to bring together both the Highrise and Impala sides of the builder experience.

Alejandro explained that he would begin with the Highrise overview before passing the discussion to the Impala team, which would be better positioned to address the more technical questions from builders.

Bar Yochai from Impala also participated in the session, representing the technical and API side of the broader offering.

The combination is important for builders because infrastructure access on its own is only one layer of building an AI application. Developers also need practical ways to connect their applications to models and inference services.

The Highrise and Impala relationship gives Future Caribbean teams exposure to both sides of that equation: the infrastructure foundation and the API layer developers can incorporate into their applications.

Compute as a core builder resource

For an Agentic AI buildathon, compute is not simply a background technical concern.

Modern agent-powered applications can involve multiple model calls, reasoning loops, search, tool execution, memory systems, multimodal processing, and other workloads that quickly increase infrastructure requirements.

Providing compute access therefore gives selected Future Caribbean teams greater room to experiment with more ambitious architectures.

The onboarding call also gave teams an opportunity to understand that these infrastructure resources are part of a broader collection of tools being assembled for builders rather than isolated product offerings.

Lily emphasized that while selected teams had received Highrise compute, other resources were available for teams across the community as well.

Supporting teams at different stages

Not every Future Caribbean team enters the buildathon with the same technical requirements.

Some projects may be able to build their early prototypes primarily through hosted APIs. Others may require more direct compute access, specialized infrastructure, or greater control over their deployment environment.

By bringing infrastructure providers directly into onboarding sessions, Future Caribbean is giving builders an opportunity to understand these options before making architectural decisions.

That is particularly useful as teams move from an idea to a prototype and eventually toward a working product.

A team may begin with simple model inference but later discover that it needs more compute, more control over its environment, or a different inference architecture. Understanding the Highrise and Impala ecosystem gives builders another set of options as those requirements evolve.

Direct access to the teams behind the technology

Another important aspect of the session was the opportunity for builders to interact directly with the teams providing the infrastructure.

Rather than simply distributing accounts and API access, Future Caribbean brought the providers into the community so builders could understand where the technology came from, how the different products relate to one another, and where technical questions should be directed.

Alejandro explicitly positioned the Impala team as the resource for the more detailed technical questions surrounding the offering.

That kind of direct technical access is particularly valuable during a buildathon, where teams are making decisions quickly and integration issues can otherwise consume valuable development time.

Infrastructure for the next generation of Caribbean AI applications

The Highrise & Impala onboarding session highlighted an important part of the Future Caribbean buildathon: ambitious AI applications require more than models.

They require infrastructure.

They require inference.

They require APIs, compute, deployment environments, and technical partners capable of helping teams move from experimentation to working products.

Highrise brings the digital infrastructure perspective, backed by a parent company whose history has required operating compute-intensive infrastructure at scale. Impala brings another important layer to the builder ecosystem through its API and inference capabilities, with Bar Yochai participating alongside the Highrise team to support the community.

For the Future Caribbean teams receiving Highrise compute, those resources provide additional capacity to experiment and build during the Agentic AI Buildathon. For the wider community, the session offered something equally useful: greater visibility into the infrastructure available behind modern AI applications and the teams making that technology accessible to builders.

Together, Highrise, Impala, and Future Caribbean are helping ensure that builders have access not only to powerful AI ideas, but to the infrastructure needed to turn those ideas into real products.