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Carmen Li

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2026-06-15

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2026-06-15

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1. “So that happens in every other markets, right? Abian market, if you do OTC trade, you have the race some month yield, doesn't matter who they are, right? So there's a lot of mechanism to hedge that. The things you cannot hedge is GPU cost, right? The price you entered. So that's something exactly what CME Futures is for. You can have the transparency and the liquidity and then the easiness of tweeting in and out and hedge your position.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “But they don't translate to immediate GPU availability in the servers, which you have to be a waitlisted if you buy brand new stuff, co-location, you need optic fiber. So it's a lot of, unfortunately, star has to be aligned.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Can you get your money back for the price you pay right? It's actually pretty straightforward for the machine level. But to your point, right? You can say, hey, what happened if demand dropped? No one going to use your whatever things you have. But remember the four contracts signed contract. If you have that, you kind of know. Obviously, if you have things, the biggest concern is people have concern over built. If you've overbuilt, then by theory, then all your prices will calm down because it oversupply the market, right? So then you talk about supply demand equilibrium. How do we know about the future demand of GPUs, right? I don't know that. Everyone's guess is better than mine probably. The way I look at it is not that easy to bring energy online, right? You hear all those big data center bill, $25 billion invested.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “So, as an index provider, I cannot give any formal guidance. Nor do I know, right? Jing Fairness, I know I know. So the way I look at it is we had defined a bubble, right? So you look at stop bubble, right? The Nasdaq shoot up 200% and came back down to 84%, whatever back then. It's a bubble, right? The way I look at bubble is your valuation can your future cash flow support today's valuation of yours, right? So then”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “It's November, December analysis. Right now it's a little different. I haven't refreshed the study, but our code is there. If you're on my data client, you can run my code, you get a number right away. Another thing I want to point out is L40s. They're like the OGs, right? At that time, people still use them. They charge you, hyperceal, they charge you 40 cents per GP per hour. So, you know, I don't know about two years worth the net number coming from, but I would do that trade every single day. You sell me you're two years old at 10 cents to a dollar, I will buy it.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yes Productive. I go interview a few times, but I don't, I mean, I'm not important, I still am not important, but back then I even less relevant. I would tell the reporters, I was like, look, I don't know what you're looking at based on my, I actually have blogs on my website, which is completely, you can just search for it. Last year, because of that conversation. I want you to curve later on. The second year, H100 residual value for refurbishment is about 85 cents on one dollar. So, a year later, you can sell 85 cents on $1. It's pretty good, I would say. The third year is $84 on $1. I think my car depreciate way more than that, right? And I drive my car for whatever 10, 10 years. So I had the data, but again, I'm not going to argue against narrative, which is.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “For contract sign in three years, discounted cash flow back, that's your risk valve now, right? So we do that calculation with people so they understand, hey, what's the value supposed to generate? And then what's the trading the market prices for refurbished or used GPU? Again, you have to test you to make sure things works and there's other nuances to that, but we help people with the understanding of the whole residual value. And that's why I hold the whole bubble thing about, but go ahead.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “So, this is cool in two different things. One is People come to Convict Change saying that hey, I want to, you know, it's Unio Cloud Provider, right? If you get a piece of land, you get a GA co-location, great, congratulations. Now your option is, number one, should I get the latest and greatest? The B300, the GBs, the Varubin with a few months, or do you want to get refurbished? And turn it out maybe sooner, right? Then to you, it's become our eye calculation for the most part, right? What's your expected future revenue generation? What's your residual value calculation? How much you're going to purchase by, right? It's actually pretty simple cash flow based RI calculation. So the way we approach residual value and the refurbishment transaction is, you know, based on RI, this is your potential break-even. Look at H100, right? Obviously, you're not going to charge as high speed 200, but your cost base is also lower. So you can do the future as you assume a few years of.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Three months came up to like eight percent for the age 100. The a100 is the older oldest chips among the three, right? They're pretty much a commodity at this point. The price came down, they stabilized, but the price came up about 10, 15% for the past three months. Remember, the A100, right? They're not the latest and greatest at all. So, this also tells you supply demand curve shifting.”

   2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “The line, the y line is interesting, right? So every new chip we came out based on historical data, A100, H100, usually came out to be high. And then comes down as more supply came life. And then price came down and then stabilizes. So that's the trend we have observed for A100 and then for H100. So when B2 country came out, we published the data last year at Bloomberg, this early this year, the price was high and it came down, which is kind of what I expected, but the slope was less steep than I expected. I was like, hmm, that's interesting. The slope wasn't as steep. And then quickly observed the price just came up. And now it's higher than the initial open, whatever you call that, right? Lounge prices. That shows your demand supply curve in a different stage than whatever stage we had before. So the A100 didn't, the red line is H100, NewCloud on-demand per GPO power rate. So you can see the price came down last year a little bit. Sorry about the scale, so you don't see much, but came down and came back up quite a bit. I think the last”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “So you're looking at the doll per GPO per hour rental rate on demand for three chips. The top one, the yellow line, is between 200 new cloud on demand per GP flower. Sorry, it's a mouthful.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “So, the ones you mentioned, they mostly are closed source models, as we call it, right? But they do have some open source models. But they're famous for their closed source models. So we actually track 300 open source models globally upon pricing and consumption point of view. It is really interesting if we have actually, we haven't really formally launched LM token disease. You can currently look at Bloomberg and it's on Bloomberg. What's interesting is people depends. It's all based on your choices. Right now, the price actually doubled file indices from now from December 1st last year. It's like $2.21 per million token. It's a mixture of input open token prices average weighted by consumption by basketball models. It's not here. This is GPU, unfortunately.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Not at all. So we actually work with polymarket last year. Someone actually listed my product at Polymarket with my consent. It's always start like that. And then someone told me that, and now we try to polymarket and say, hey, do you want to do something more real? So we did February settled and April settled a few contracts on polymarket just to test the order, right? Obviously, we're exclusively with CME right now. But yeah, so I think obviously you have to do a right licensing, non-metal pillar, right? All the right things. Yeah, I don't can do whatever they want. And then people will choose the best product for them to use.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “The beauty of CME is you can do the same thing you're doing now treating CME products. Same process, seven processing margin, that's why you get great margin optimization, right? Everything is BAU. It's no different. We don't have anything right now.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Just like the traditional oil settlement prices goes for contracts, obviously we do four right now at Compute Change, but we're always open to do physical deliver futures, especially given we do have silicon mark, which is GPO benchmarking. So imagine the future you can do, hey, I want a 20 grade A B200, this configuration, this shape of servers in US East, and then at the end we'll get that. Well, usually API calls so you don't get physical and it's not as cool as physically give you away wafer, but you get API calls.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “There's a lot of context where number one GPU is not a homogeneous product. Number two, you have to understand the use cases for A100, H100. Right now, they are not that correlated. Right? Maybe that's not right. I don't know. There are use cases which they're pretty separate, but maybe there are use cases they can be transferred. And also their software layer to this, right? So right now you can argue with certain use cases, some large amount of models cannot be deployed and the legacy chips. But this doesn't mean six months later it cannot do so as the software layer compression model compression gets better, optimization gets better, things can change. So really understand not just the hardware configuration, this local supply demand curve for the server itself, also the software layer. That's kind of critical, right? That's really changes supply demand curve and all the way to the user behavior. So it's going to take some time since we have engaged with a lot of participants.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Conversation has been going on for a very long time with various banks. Various market participants, speculators, they are all very excited. So some banks obviously have both sides of the trade, right? So they can cross off some positions internally. That's great. Obviously some they have to use leveraging external products. So that's where we come in. The way I encourage them to do is I selfishly I want them to start trading desks on compute. The more people trade, the better for me, right? Selfishly. At the same time it's important for people to understand GPU trading. It's not like you can't just move someone from trade all your electricity with no background context jumping to GPU compute futures.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “So, I can't comment on other people's mythology because I actually do not know different raw data, different mythology will eventually drive to different prices. So the way I would look at this is, you know, it's always smart for anyone to look at multiple data sources and then figure out what is the actual decision you have to make, which data source do you trust. The market always voltages trading, the market always gravitates where things actually help them hedge, right? If you easily manipulateable, if you are not data source, people actually hatch, what's the point aside from speculation, right? So, you know, I love to say, I mean, I also strongly believe we're the best, but again, I will let the market decide, which will happen very soon.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Price is different on a Friday versus Wednesday. You do them up. Well, first you have conversations, say, hey, I love what you do, you're a green new cloud. Can I license your data? Usually, your feedback is what is in for me. And I would tell out commercials. And then your concern could be hey, you know, if I give you all my data, I give my way all my secrets, and I would go through traditional licensing agreement, can I disclose what I want from you? What I do not want from you, what's the pipeline look like? You use a street bucket job, are you running my API to yours? Are you writing to mine? It's a lot of conversation. It's actually a pretty standard conversation. And right now we have 8 million pricing points globally, around 200 data sources.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “So it is a very, can be lengthy depends on what data sources. The nature of GPU spa market, so computer is one of them, and the many, many new clouds, hyperscaler marketplaces all have very different contract size. So I was in datum business for a period of time. So everything is pretty intuitive to me. It's very important to get a variety of data sources, especially for computers.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “A very healthy commodity volatility range. So I don't manage volatility, just happen to be that volatility that can change. It's all because we normalize it. If you look at each individual chip configuration at different geolocation, the volatility are different. There are some chips with 8% volatility, some chips with over 100 Because normalization of indices, you actually get a very healthy trony daily ball.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “So it's interesting. So, last year when GP price all going down, the big conversation is why do you need indices for something price will always go down? And this year is why do you want the indices when price always go up? Literally, this is all the question I get. It's pretty fascinating. So one thing we look at volatility, we look at daily volatility movement, not the price up and down, right? The daily volatility for A100, H100 is around 20 to 30.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Factor drive the price differentiation. So every day over $150,000 Twitter prices ingest our platform and we normalize the traded prices based on the different characteristics of the model itself and normalized to a base case and then we do the math of settlement prices calculation. So then this price will be highly correlated ideally. As much as it can to the price you pay at a neocloud, for example. However, it won't be the same, just like basis trading, right? Like every other commodity, there's a basis risk. We're helping client calculating the basis risk. So you know, hey, US East, you may be a bibs higher or two, then there's expectation, a manageable correlation understanding of the indices”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “This is the whole goal for me sitting here actually, right? There's a meaningful every financial products in the functional reason for commodity. It is for hedging. This speculation is great, but really for people to hatch their relativity, to do risk allocation, to do risk transfer, and then asset capital allocation. If we can do Joe, what you said, then we fail at our job, right? So that's why we went all the way back, the way we develop our index model is not a simple math. It's not, hey, you have two H100 to simple average, right? Because then you compare apple to oranges. The 2H100 can have different CPU, different RAM, different disk, differential location, different memory bandwidth. You cannot do simple math. What we do is we usually collect six months of historical trading data from over 100 data sources, and we see which”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “For say, hey, I want a 200 be 200 nodes. Obviously, we'll give you specs back and the commercial back. Same time, independently verify the performances on flops, memory bandwidth, tokens, and other information, SLAs and other things. And as a user, you can decide its price your most important criteria. Maybe it is. Or maybe you're willing to pay a premium for geolocation or the performances that you care more about on latency, right? We believe gave people the option and transparency is the most important thing.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “So I usually don't let you slides, but this time, because you mentioned really quick questions, so we actually call it GPU lottery. So we publish a paper early this year at GP GPU conference with Jefferson Lab on GPU performances. Well, actually, so what can help you create a link to the audience later on? This is A100, by the way. I know we didn't put A100, 40 gigabytes memory bandwidth. We proved that 38% performance variance for the same chip. And we decompose into the chip self, intrap provider, and interprovider. And there's a main reason for that, right? And to your point, you don't know until you get your GPUs. We have a platform GPU. Carfax for GPU depends how you look at it. So we in Compuxion, you actually verify the GPU before delivered to you. So basically you can off you.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Exactly. You have GPUs, right? Or the banks where GPUs on your balance sheet, right? You're long GPUs. Naturally, you want to make sure revenue is stable to a certain degree, and then you want to use future to do so. If you are naturally short GPU, which is everybody in this room, unless you tell me you have GPUs, right? Then depends how much you use. If you want to control your cost volatility, you want to use future to hedge as well. Just on the compute exchange.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Volatility by shorting futures or port options. If you're naturally short oil, American line, right? They want to control their cost volatility. They want to obviously use future options as well. Simple to compute your new cloud or you or anyone have the servers, ideally you want to have predictable revenue strings.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “That doesn't help when you can have a predictable margin. And also in terms of scarce, you're not guaranteed for your GPU resources for next hour or next month. So you see a lot of people shifting from on demand to reserve even four contracts, right? So full contracts, you basically lock in deliverables for the next whatever month, right? Starting in September maybe or starting November, February rubens, right? So this all comes because of market condition. So computing should cover that the physical GPU procurement, also token. So we'll love to talk about token as well. On flip side, who's going to use the futures options can be a similar set of people, right? You look at oil market, which we all love WTM brand, right? The people use WTM brand, a lot of them are naturally long oil. So the shells, right, the producers, they need to hatch your rest.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Great question. So, the computer market right now for compute change, we have all our provider mostly clouds around the world. Another side is a big variety from AI startup. So even though they are startup, they spend millions of dollars on GPUs already. There are enterprises who are traditional businesses, but they are needing a node, two nodes, a few servers here and there for their inferencing or I don't know, other deployment needs. They are providers, they are inferencing providers, right? They don't own GPUs, but they provide open source open weights, model support for other use cases. So what's the big variety North American firms? They do a variety of combinational contracts, obviously on-demand give you the most flexibility. You don't pay when you don't use it. However, you're also at the mercy of demand supply curve at any given time, so translate to your price can go from three dollars to six to nine depends on demand supply curve shifting.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Year later, we launched a partnership with Yemi, so it's quite exciting. Separately, I heard you mention Compute Exchange 34, so thank you for doing that, Joel. I'm the CEO for Compute Change, which is spot marketplace for GPU procurement. So we do reserve contracts forward contracts, as well as refurbished contracts.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yeah, so thank you for the question and great audience. Before I do that, I'm actually going to call back to six months ago in the DOM podcast you did. You asked on the question, what if computer prices gonna go up? At that time, September, October, compute prices were going down across all chips. Now see what happened. I think you called it. I think you called the market called it. So I'm the founder CEO for Silicon Data. So that's the index provider for GPU indices. We recently announced partnership with CME. So we will be launching GPU future and options in couple of months TC approval obviously. So that's quite exciting. We've been working on GPU indices for past two and a half years starting 2024 April. So it's been a while. We launched world's first GPU indices. At Blumber Terminal in 2025.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “He's a big one. Or one ship, the same ship at one data set or mine not equal to the same ship at a different data center.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Right. And so his new venture is one that actually there's quite a bit of competition in and quite of excitement in. And it's essentially like, okay, GPUs, we know they're very important for the AI boom, et cetera. The question is, can GPU capacity, which is scarce, can it become a tradable commodity such that I can buy futures to lock in my price of access to compute power? Could I sell, resell those futures? Will there be speculators speculating on the upper down price of like an H100 running an H100 NVIDIA chip for an hour? This is a big question. We know there's a lot of interest in the actual compute, but whether there's interest in compute futures that's tradable instruments is a very TBD.”

    2026-06-15 · Odd Lots · Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source