Pantera Junior Partner Jay Yu: Computing power may become a commodity asset

Pantera Capital Junior Partner Jay Yu published an article titled "The Rise of Compute Markets," stating that computing power and data center spending have become a trillion-dollar category, but GPU procurement is still mainly done through group chats, over-the-counter brokers, and bilateral agreements. He noted that the financialization of computing power is still in its early stages, constrained by SKU, time, and location, but could become a commodity asset similar to electricity or oil in the next 5 to 10 years. Jay Yu believes that the computing power market may form a "hardware-supplier-cluster" structure similar to the electricity "grid-operator-node," with new cloud vendors being structural shorts on GPUs, while on-demand platforms and application layers are longs.

He mentioned that for every $100 spent on inference at the application layer, about $45 flows to the on-demand layer, about $50 flows to the new cloud or GPU layer, and about $5 flows to routing layers like OpenRouter. NVIDIA can be seen as the "central bank" of computing power, having announced support for up to 25% residual value. He also stated that physical delivery has a more enduring moat, and indices, cash-settled exchanges, and financing tools will subsequently emerge, with participants including SF Compute, Vast AI, Runpod, Compute Exchange, and others. The computing power market does not have mandatory price transparency requirements, and basis risk may be greater.