Compute futures market will be the new oil
Itô (@itomarkets)
There is no single price of compute.
We run a harvester that aggregates GPU rental quotes across the venues we can reach programmatically: the Azure Retail Prices API, RunPod, Vast.ai, and the SemiAnalysis public contract preview. On July 4 it collected 1,417 price observations in one day. The chart shows every quote normalized to dollars per GPU-hour, one row per SKU.
What the data shows:
H100 is the row we care about most, so it's highlighted. 15 current quotes: $1.33 on Vast at the low, $1.99 to $3.29 on RunPod, $3.85 on the May on-demand contract band at the high. Median $2.59.
That's a 2.9x range between the cheapest and most expensive quote for the same chip on the same day. The difference comes from term (spot vs 1-year commit), interconnect, storage, and which venue you happen to be looking at.
The rest of the complex is wider.
RTXPRO6000: 27 quotes, $0.33 to $2.09, a 6.3x range.
H200: 10 quotes, $0.50 to $4.39, 8.8x, where the low end is a term commitment and the high end is spot from a venue with little competition on that SKU.
L4 runs 13.9x.
V100 runs 12x, mostly because clouds dumping legacy inventory and marketplaces renting scarce residual capacity price the same part very differently.
B200 is the tightest at 1.4x because few venues have it at all.
The reason this dispersion persists is simple: the quotes are heterogeneous, and the venues don't clear against each other. There is no consolidated tape for GPUs.
Normally a gap like that gets arbitraged: buy the cheap one, sell the expensive one, and the prices converge. That only works when the two things are interchangeable.
One barrel of WTI at Cushing is the same as another, one share of a stock is the same as another, and a central order book can match any buyer with any seller because of it.
Two H100 quotes at the same headline price can be completely different products.
One is spot, cancellable any hour; the other is a 1-year commit.
One is SXM on an NDR InfiniBand fabric that can run a distributed training job; the other is PCIe on Ethernet that cannot.
One includes 300TB of attached NFS; the other bills storage separately.
One is in a region your data can legally sit in; the other is not.
An Azure SLA and a marketplace host with one machine are also very different counterparties. The $1.33 Vast quote and the $3.85 contract band are different instruments once you read past the headline price, and you cannot short one against the other, which is why the gap stays open.
The same heterogeneity is why nobody has managed to build a compute exchange that works.
To run a central order book you have to standardize the contract: fix the SKU, the fabric, the term, the region, the delivery mechanism, the failure remedies. Every attribute you fix makes the contract cleaner to trade and cuts out more of the actual supply, because most real capacity doesn't match the standard spec.
If you keep the contract flexible instead, every trade needs bilateral negotiation again, and you have rebuilt OTC with extra steps.
Oil, gas, and power all went through this, and the second chart shows the sequence each of them followed. OTC comes first: bespoke physical deals negotiated one by one between principals, which is how oil traded for over a century.
Out of those bilateral prints a reference price emerges (Platts assessments for oil, Henry Hub for gas).
Only then can standardized futures list against the index, and once they do, the two layers settle into their permanent shape: OTC desks transfer the bespoke risk and hedge it on the exchange benchmark.
WTI futures listed in 1983, more than a century after oil started trading bilaterally.
Henry Hub futures listed in 1990. Nord Pool for power came in 1996.
Compute is at the OTC stage of that sequence right now, with the reference indices only just appearing and the futures beginning to list.
Getting from here to standardized contracts takes normalization at scale: pull every quote from every venue, decompose it into its attributes (SKU, quantity, price, term, fabric, storage, region, start window, counterparty), price each attribute, and map the bespoke thing a supplier is actually offering onto the standardized thing a contract can clear.
The distribution changes all day across dozens of venues and hundreds of SKU-region-term combinations.
A person can sample it a few times a day.
An agent can hold all of it continuously and re-normalize every time a quote moves. Our 1,417 observations came from one harvester on four venues in one day, and the full market is far larger.
That is why we think the agentic layer comes before the exchange rather than competing with it. The exchange needs a fungible underlying.
— https://nitter.net/itomarkets/status/2078263441307934735#m