Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute

Carmen Lee, CEO of Compute Exchange and Silicon Data, is building the world’s first futures market for GPU compute power—turning a critical AI bottleneck into a tradable financial instrument. Her vision hinges on solving the core problem of fungibility: not all GPUs are equal, and performance varies wildly even within the same chip model. To address this, her team developed a sophisticated index system that normalizes pricing across 200 data sources, accounting for chip configuration, location, and software layer effects. The result? A highly volatile, 20–30% daily volatility index for H100 and A100 chips—perfect for hedging. The market is already live with CME futures, financially settled, and designed to be accessible through existing brokerage infrastructure. But the real innovation isn’t just the product—it’s the ecosystem: from refurbishing used GPUs to enabling speculative trading, and even testing early contracts on prediction markets like Polymarket. As AI demand surges and supply chains remain fragile, Lee argues that financial markets must evolve to manage risk—not just for giants like OpenAI, but for startups, enterprises, and even cloud providers who now face unpredictable compute costs. The question isn’t whether this market will exist—it already is. The real test is whether it will become liquid enough to truly stabilize the AI economy.