Practice focus · Energy & Compute
Compute is congealed electricity. Almost none of it is priced that way yet.
The first new major commodity in decades is being financialised in public, and the complex is being assembled out of order — futures listed before benchmarks are governed, indices published before their denominators are measured, credit extended before any of it can be marked. This section follows the stack from the bottom up: what a GPU-hour physically is, where its electricity is priced, who gets to define the benchmark, how paper converts into racks, what the tokens on the other side are worth, and who is financing the whole thing.
Every piece runs on primary data — measured power traces, hourly settlements, contract texts and settlement metadata pulled from the venues themselves — and ships with the tooling to re-run it.
1 · The denominator — what a GPU-hour actually is
Every index, every hedge and every credit structure downstream rests on a measurement nobody publishes: how much energy a GPU-hour consumes, and how many tokens it produces. The work starts here because everything else inherits the error.
Measured H100 workload power against the nameplate-TDP convention: duty factors 0.795–0.880, nameplate overstating device energy 12–21%, facility derates of 73–80%
Measured facility profiles joined to 401,379 hourly DA settlements: the load-weighted price runs up to 9.4% above flat-block, and the premium peaks at 40% utilization — the ramp phase, not saturation
The heat rate of inference measured at 11.6M tokens per GPU-hour from 1,024 vLLM runs joined to NVML traces — the conversion term the whole complex needs and no administrator publishes
2 · The power leg — where the electricity is actually priced
A data center is a load shape before it is anything else. The energy work exists because the compute work needs a fuel leg that is priced hour by hour, not as a flat annual block.
Nodal's 168 hourly futures, ElectronX's bounded hours and ICE's TB4 — analysed on three years of ERCOT and PJM settlements, with a 24×24 spread monitor and TB4 tail distributions
430+ risk factors and 470+ contracts across ICE EU/US, NYMEX and Nodal, with positions decomposed into dated factor legs
ICE × NATIVX's COIL index — the first energy-normalized compute futures, stress-tested against 374,550 hourly settlements. What normalization removes as noise, the hourly complex sells back as basis
3 · The index layer — five administrators, no rulebooks
Once compute has a price it needs a benchmark, and a benchmark is a governance object before it is a number. This is where the practice has spent the most time, because it is where the asset class is least finished.
Component-level catalogue of every administrator positioned to bear settlement weight — and the finding that not one publishes a rulebook, IOSCO statement, audit or oversight committee
A fifth administrator, outside the CFTC perimeter, disclosing more of its construction than any of the four inside it — and still not reproducible. Publication answers IOSCO Principle 9, not Principle 11
Kalshi's ladders settle on Ornn OCPI, so a strip of digitals is a discretised distribution — the first continuously published compute term structure, with a $1.23/GPU-hour convenience yield measured against reserved-tier term sheets
Kalshi, Architect, CME × Silicon Data and ICE × Ornn — the race to price the GPU term structure, and how much of it settles on one index family
The six-level hierarchy the rest of the work indexes against: benchmark, grade, region, firmness, tenor, venue
4 · Delivery — where paper becomes racks
A cash-settled contract is a bet on an index. A contract that converts into capacity is forward procurement, and the difference decides whether hedgers show up at all.
Architect × Compute Desk's exchange-for-physical network read through the crude, gold, gas and metals precedents, with basis tables and convergence mechanics
Kalshi and Polymarket settle on the same Ornn URL — the first live compute spread with the index basis verified at zero, and still unreadable. Disclosure is necessary and visibly not sufficient
Also in Predictive Markets5 · The product leg — the tokens compute actually produces
GPU-hours are the input. Tokens are the output, and they have their own price, their own volatility and — so far — no settlement-grade index. This is the newest thread and the one with the most open ground.
A designed-but-unsited token futures contract tested against the venue that could settle it: 56 live quotes, a 7× spread on identical open weights, and the four places the index breaks
Fixed subscriptions downstream, floating token costs upstream — a commodity retailer's book. Token forwards versus GPU futures, with the efficiency curve as the unhedgeable basis between the units
6 · The credit layer — who finances the racks
Compute became an asset class the moment lenders started underwriting it. These two pieces are the applied end of everything above: the index work becomes a validation program, and the measurement work becomes a collateral curve.
Settlement mechanism, standardization tier and index validation for specialty compute lenders — five checks that require no administrator cooperation, with the power leg grounded in ERCOT and Dominion
Two structures for the unrated side of the market, running the same pipe in opposite directions — exposure ladders on both sides and the hedge program each would need
7 · Synthesis — driving the whole complex
The workbench that connects every layer above: chips to megawatts to basis, with the options, margin and take-or-pay economics attached.
Where this connects
The threads that run out of this one.
The compute forward curve was extracted from event-contract ladders. The venue and settlement questions are the same questions, asked of a different underlying.
Digital & derivativesCompute credit is being financed on the same tokenized collateral rails the settlement work tracks — and margined under the same perpetual-futures mechanics.
Market structure radarIndex launches, contract filings and regulatory shifts across the compute and power complex, tracked continuously and sourced to primary filings.