I counted the companies building market structure for AI compute: indices, venues, desks, exchanges, credit and insurance around the GPU-hour, not the clouds that sell it. I got to 58 in seven boxes, starting from the
@socialgraphvc primer and the
@0xfishylosopher essay, and I am fairly sure the real number is higher.
Price discovery.
@Silicon_Data runs the H100 and B200 rental indices that CME's October futures are designed to settle on,
@OrnnExchange publishes OCPI and a volatility index and has ICE as its futures partner,
@ComputeDesk puts IOSCO-compliant indexes built from private OTC transactions on Bloomberg, NATIVX normalises GPU prices to an energy unit, and
@SemiAnalysis_ tracks contract prices and runs the ClusterMAX census of 209 GPU clouds.
Spot venues, auctions and aggregators.
@sfcompute runs an order book where contracts can be resold,
@computeexchange auctions reserved capacity for one to 36 months and opened a used-GPU secondary market in July,
@getcomputable sells dedicated H100 nodes by the calendar week in sealed-bid auctions, and
@stoaexchange discovers clearing levels for the hardware itself.
@mithrilcompute,
@shadeformai and
@get_hydrahost aggregate other people's clouds into one buying surface, and Hydra raised $100M in June for that, with an offtake network attached. NVIDIA's DGX Cloud Lepton does the same from the top of the stack, while RunPod,
Vast.ai, TensorDock, Salad and Clore run the spot layer.
Decentralised networks.
@akashnet,
@ionet,
@AethirCloud,
@rendernetwork,
@nosana_ai and
@spheron match GPU supply and demand with on-chain settlement,
@fluence_project started auctioning reserved GPU clusters in August with 6,000 GPUs across 13 countries,
@PrimeIntellect and
@GensynAI come at the same market from distributed training, and Hyperbolic, Golem, Theta EdgeCloud, Aleph Cloud, Lium and Targon fill out the box. A large share of this whole map is crypto-native, which the primer also noticed.
Desks and brokers.
@itomarkets quotes a single fixed GPU-hour rate with an SLA and stands as principal,
@intheanera runs a forward capacity market for deliverable inference and calls itself a clearinghouse for AI risk, and the incumbents have arrived:
@BGCGroupInc opened an OTC desk for secondary compute and memory capacity in June, and
@FalconXGlobal dealt what it calls the first OTC swap on the forward price of compute, referencing Ornn's H100 index.
Exchanges and derivatives.
@CMEGroup,
@ICE_Markets and
@NodalExchange have all announced GPU futures this year, Nodal on Compute Desk's indexes next to its power contracts.
@Architect_Fi builds GPU and DRAM perps with a bridge into physical delivery,
@liquidcompute is going the CFTC exchange and clearinghouse route,
@MNX_fi runs H100 perps and lab valuation futures, Hyperliquid already trades H100 perps, Kalshi and Polymarket run GPU price markets, and
@castle_tech_ builds markets for the exposures a data center cannot hedge today, permits first.
Credit.
@USDai_Official lends up to 70% LTV against tokenised warehouse receipts on the hardware,
@gaib_ai and
@Compute_Labs turn GPU financing and GPU ownership into yield-bearing tokens,
@cysic_xyz does the same for mixed hardware, and
@gpufinancing writes plain GPU equipment loans and leases. More than $20B of GPU-collateralised loans are outstanding, and in my experience the borrowers below investment grade still mostly sit outside that number.
Insurance, collateral and plumbing.
@amcompute1 writes declining residual value floors for up to three years,
@PRINCEPSdev turns SLA terms into coverage carriers can bind, Barkr issues Munich Re-backed warrantied valuations of GPU collateral,
@Aravolta_X25 monitors the collateral through telemetry, and
@netbackyard does the metering and billing that turns capacity into a tradable unit.
And the incumbents moved faster than I expected: CME, ICE and Nodal announced GPU futures between May and September, and BGC opened its desk in June.
If you are building in any of these boxes and you are not on the map, reply with what you do.
If I put you in the wrong box, pls say so.
There is also a WhatsApp group for people building in compute markets, so DM me or
@jessiedong_ if you want to be added.