Silicon Data has closed a $30 million Series A funding round to help Wall Street put a price on AI compute. The startup aims to become the reference price for GPU rental and create an index that a Wall Street futures contract would settle against.
The company plans to launch compute futures trading on the CME on October 5th, pending regulatory approval. The discussion on TechCrunch's Equity podcast with Steve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, covers the health of the AI buildout and why the data tells a different story than doom-and-gloom headlines about depreciating chips and stalled data centers.
With hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into data centers and GPUs annually, compute has become the single biggest cost for AI product builders, yet there hasn't been a straightforward way to price compute or hedge exposure when prices change.