INTERVIEW
Five Minutes with Silicon Data’s Carmen Li
When I first heard about trading “compute,” it struck me as odd. Why would we need market infrastructure for GPU chips the same way we do for oil?
Computing capacity, powered by GPU chips that run AI models, is reusable, unlike oil or wheat. But the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense.
The closest analogy is the freight market. Like a cargo ship that hauls different loads on different routes, the same compute can train different models.
The freight parallel goes deeper than just reusability. When freight markets matured in the 1990s, they became fully financialized—traders could buy and sell exposure to shipping rates, hedge price swings, and trade Baltic Dry Index futures.
New commodities often become financialized once volatility and market demand make risk hedging necessary.
That moment may be arriving for compute, with some well-known Wall Street traders believing compute demand will rival and then exceed the demand for oil.
Back in May, I highlighted this quote from DRW founder Don Wilson, who has a history of bringing new markets to the mainstream.
"The total dollars spent on compute will, over the next 10 years, exceed total dollars spent on oil.” DRW’s Don Wilson to the WSJ.
He invested in Silicon Data, a company that provides GPU pricing data and benchmarking services to hedge funds, banks, and AI firms.
I spoke with Silicon Data’s founder, Carmen Li, who’s just as bullish. After stints at Bloomberg, Citi, and DRW Trading, she launched the company in April 2024 to bring financial infrastructure to compute. The company raised $4.7 million in May, which I covered here.
Full disclosure: Carmen and I worked at Bloomberg in 2022, but never crossed paths. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Matt: You've worked at some major financial firms—DRW, Citi, Bloomberg. What made you take the entrepreneurial leap?
Carmen: I wasn't a 20-year-old genius with a great idea in college. I kept thinking about ideas throughout my career, but this was the first idea where I thought, 'I'm the only person who can do this.' I was completely biased, crazily overconfident about the whole situation. When I told everybody, I started my own company, everyone was like, 'I knew it'—Everyone was like, 'that's who you are.'
Matt: What made you commit?
Carmen: I strongly believe compute will be the largest human resource going forward—it will surpass any energy product in a few years. We need all the traditional financial infrastructure: indexes, data benchmarking, futures, options, swaps for compute. I felt like I was one of the few people who understood both the trading side and GPUs. People who understand GPUs have limited experience with derivative products—options, futures, indexes. Those with expertise in derivatives aren’t necessarily fully attuned to the GPU space.
Matt: What does Silicon Data do?
Carmen: Think of me as the Bloomberg for GPU pricing. You cannot buy compute from Silicon Data, just like you cannot buy actual stocks from Bloomberg. We're different from the spot exchanges—you can actually get physical compute from them. They do spot, we do the data layer. We're working with futures exchanges to launch products based on our indexes.
Matt: What problem are you solving in the GPU market?
Carmen: Even if you're a sophisticated user—say, a PM or machine learning engineer at a hedge fund—it's not your job to config and double-check GPUs. It's almost like being a great driver—it's not your job to fix the engine.
So let's say you're looking for GPU clusters and I tell you, 'Hey, I have 20 nodes in New Jersey, all H100s with the same configuration and Linux environment. You can run your workflow right away with good latency.' You pay—10 days, maybe a month—and it's expensive. Very expensive. You then discover it's 20 nodes with a different setup than promised, or some Linux environments are inconsistent. So it takes a lot of time to synchronize.
There's no insurance, no guarantee, no standardization. It's mind-blowing. If you and me buy a t-shirt on Amazon, we can return it. But GPUs are freaking expensive and there's no insurance policy, no guarantees, nothing.
