The following is from the article but I edited it so much by moving sentences around I decided not to use the quote tag.

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The number is two to the 136,279,841st power minus one. Luke Durant is a 36-year-old programmer retired from chipmaker Nvidia in 2021. The discovery was the result of almost exactly one year of work and about $2 million of Durant’s own money. He used the GPUs, the technology he had a hand in developing at Nvidia. A typical CPU would take a week or two to test a number to see whether it is prime. It takes GPUs about a day or two.

Durant, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, found the new prime number using only publicly available unused cloud storage space. Durant, who made his money off the boom, said he put his time and money into the project to show people that they aren’t helpless to technology giants and that we can figure out massive problems if we work together. He said...

"Individuals today are dramatically more capable than any point in history. The scale of computing available in the cloud, it’s nearly unfathomable. I was able to find this number that’s astonishingly large … but I was able to do it just by using big tech’s leftovers. So it’s trying to [highlight the fact that] we have these incredible systems, so let’s figure out how to best use them."

Woltman said about 3,000 to 5,000 volunteers have downloaded a piece of software that tasks unused space on their computers to crunch these numbers in the background.