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With the PC market looking anything but jolly this holiday season, Gateway has turned to a services model to generate revenue from excess inventory. The PC maker is linking 8,000 display-model PCs at its retail locations nationwide to create a grid that small and midsize companies can access on demand for 15 cents per CPU per hour.

Gateway is offering the service in conjunction with United Devices, which is using its Alliance MetaProcessor software to route workloads throughout the grid to ensure that customers have enough capacity. Who would've thought that idle inventory could generate revenue?