AI Summary
5 min readDon Wilson, founder and CEO of the trading firm DRW, has spent the past year trying to build a futures market for GPUs. The core problem is straightforward: nobody knows what a B200 chip will be worth four years from now. That uncertainty makes it expensive for the companies that buy and rent out these chips to raise capital. Wilson argues that a futures contract would let them lock in future prices, lower their cost of capital, and ultimately make the whole AI infrastructure build more efficient. But the product isn't listed yet, and the conversation reveals why — and what happens next.
The market these futures would serve
The need for GPU futures is visible in the bond market. When the hosts mention CoreWeave bonds yielding 15%, Wilson points to that as a direct signal of unmet demand for risk management. If you are a "neo cloud" renting GPUs to the most creditworthy companies, your financing costs are manageable. But many GPU buyers are less established — smaller AI labs, startups running open-source models — and lenders charge a premium for that uncertainty.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Odd Lots: Don Wilson on the GPU Market's Trillion Dollar Question
- 2 (02:01) **Introduction and Setting the Stage** - Joe and Tracy introduce Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW, who is building futures markets for GPUs and compute.
- 3 (02:44) **Reading the AI Tea Leaves: CoreWeave and Anthropic Jitters** - Don responds to recent volatility in the AI trade, including CoreWeave bonds yielding 15% and Anthropic's revenue growth decelerating.
- 4 (03:47) **What CoreWeave's 15% Bonds Tell Us** - Don explains how GPU futures would directly address the cost-of-capital problems that high-yield bonds reveal.
- 5 (05:39) **The Regulatory Roadblock: Why GPU Futures Don't Exist Yet** - Don updates the status of CME's GPU futures contract, which faces a CFTC comment period that could allow listing by November 9th.
- 6 (06:42) **The Index Robustness Debate** - Joe presses on whether GPU price indices can be trusted when most deals are bilateral and opaque.
- 7 (08:24) **The Trillion Dollar Question: GPU Depreciation** - Don explains why GPU futures are essential despite the risk that single GPU values decline over time.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
When we spoke to Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW, in Chicago last year, he told us he wanted to build a market for GPUs that would eventually be bigger than oil. A year's time in the age of AI is an eternity, and so for the first episode of this year's Chicago live show - recorded at City Winery - Wilson joins us on stage again to talk about what's changed and what hasn't in his quest to help build this market. We get his take on the recent tech selloff, including credit concerns around neocloud CoreWeave. And we also discuss how DRW is developing a “crunch spread” (the GPU version of a crack spread), the latest on his plans to launch GPU futures, and the possibility of token futures too.
Read more: Jump, DRW Bet on New Compute Market as AI Boom Faces Scrutiny
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