Ask what—if anything—is holding back the AI industry, and the answer you get depends a lot on who you’re talking to. I asked one of Bloomberg’s former chief data wranglers, Carmen Li, and her answer was “price transparency.”
According to Li, the inability of most of the smaller AI companies to predict how much they will need to spend for the privilege of renting time on a GPU to train their models makes their businesses unpredictable and has made financing AI companies unnecessarily expensive. She founded the startup Silicon Data to create a solution: the first world-wide rental price index for a GPU.
That rental price index, called the SDH100RT, launched today. Every day, it will crunch 3.5 million data points from more than 30 sources around the world to deliver an average spot rental price for using an Nvidia H100 GPU for an hour. (“Spot price” is what a commodity to be delivered immediately sells for right now.)
“I really believe compute will be the biggest resource for humanity in the next few years,” says Li. “If my thesis is right, then it will need more sophisticated risk management.”
According to Li, such an index will lead to cheaper AI tools and more opportunities for a wider set of players to get involved in the AI industry. How do you get from an index to all that? Silicon Data’s origin story helps explain it.
US $1.04: Rental price advantage for Nvidia H100 GPUs on the East Coast of the United States versus those on the West Coast.
Until early last year, Li was in charge of global data integration at Bloomberg. In that position she met with several small companies that were trying to deliver AI-fueled data products, and many of them were struggling with the same problem. They could only offer their product at a fixed rate, but the cost of the GPU-time they needed was unpredictable. Therefore, so were their profit margins.
With typical commodities like energy, companies can plan for these swings by knowing historical trends and hedging with financial products like futures contracts. But that didn’t exist for AI’s main commodity, time on a GPU. So Li set out to create the foundation for those products, and the result is the SDH100RT price index.
She chose to index the Nvidia H100, because it’s the most widely deployed GPU, and it’s used to train new AI models. However, a price index for Nvidia A100s, which tackle a lot of inference tasks, is in the works as well. And she’s developed a method that will determine when it makes sense to index prices for other AI chips, such as those from AMD and Nvidia’s Blackwell series.
Carmen Li founded Silicon Data after a stint at Bloomberg.Silicon Data
Armed with the data, startups and others building new AI products will be able to understand their potential costs better, so they can set their services at a profitable price. And those building new AI infrastructure will be able to set a benchmark for their own revenue. But just as important, in Li’s opinion, is…
Read full article: Silicon Data Launches First GPU Rental Price Index
The post “Silicon Data Launches First GPU Rental Price Index” by Samuel K. Moore was published on 05/28/2025 by spectrum.ieee.org