Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li wants to turn GPU prices into a futures market

The AI arms race has a new front, and it has nothing to do with who builds the fastest chip. The real fight, according to Carmen Li, is over who gets to define how AI compute is priced, traded, and hedged. Li is the founder and CEO of Silicon Data, a company she launched in April 2024 with a fairly audacious premise: GPU rental prices are volatile enough, and economically significant enough, that they deserve the same financial infrastructure as oil or interest rates. Building the Bloomberg terminal for compute Silicon Data’s core product is a set of pricing indices, most notably the H100 Rental Index and a suite of LLM token indices, that aggregate hundreds of thousands of data points to track what AI compute actually costs in real time. When Li says prices fluctuated from roughly $1.20 to $1.55 per million inference tokens in early 2026, that range matters as much to an AI startup’s unit economics as crude benchmarks matter to an airline’s fuel budget. The indices feed into Compute Exchange, Silicon Data’s trading platform for GPU capacity. The exchange has reported hundreds of millions in notional trading volume since launch, and the company has accumulated more than 1,000 regis...