Building the Bloomberg for AI Chip Pricing
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 de…
