AI compute research and GPU market publications

Sovereign compute

On Sovereign Compute

Advanced AI chips have crossed from commercial input to sovereign commodity. Export licensing, rare-earth retaliation, national subsidy races, and a wave of AI-sovereignty pledges now treat GPU capacity the way states once treated oil, rare earths, and LNG: once a resource is contested, governments secure access and permanently change how the market clears. Fabrication, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced packaging sit in a handful of jurisdictions and firms, so a single policy or geographic shock can reprice fleets in days. The essay’s thesis is that compute is already on that historical arc, yet it still lacks the benchmarks and hedging tools those earlier commodities eventually required. The practical market question is how operators, buyers, and lenders should budget and finance GPU capacity when jurisdiction—not just hardware generation—can move the price overnight.

Derivatives

Compute Futures

Capital is pouring into AI infrastructure while the value of a GPU-hour remains hard to trade. The essay’s thesis is that a cash-settled future, marked to a daily compute index and paying an Asian-style average over the tenor, matches how compute is actually used: as a flow, not a single expiry print. Incremental daily settlement plus margin lets consumers, producers, and financiers hedge without taking delivery or operational SLA risk. Oil-style terminal settlement would misalign the hedge with the period of use. The market question is whether operators and investors can lock in a period-average GPU-hour cost—and transfer counterparty risk through collateral—instead of managing exposure with opaque bilateral contracts.

Derivatives

Compute as a commodity isn't oil. It's electricity.

The first hedge design for compute copied oil: lock a future price for a storable barrel. The essay’s thesis is that this analogy fails at the unit of account. Compute is quoted per GPU-hour, and unused capacity cannot be recovered, so it is a flow good. Electricity is the better analog: an unused megawatt-hour vanishes, and power markets already price location, real-time utilization, and forward delivery around that temporal structure. Compute markets are beginning to show the same features. The practical question for anyone hedging GPU cost or revenue is whether the instrument should settle like a stock commodity at expiry or like power over the period of use.