How OneChronos Is Building the Financial Markets for AI Compute

Uh, Kelly, it's really nice to see you here.

Kelly Littlepage, founder and CEO of One Chronos, grateful for your time.

Thanks for having me on.

Let's talk about applying Wall Street financial markets to the world of AI infrastructure.

First and foremost, what is One Chronos actively building?

So one Kronos right now is a US equities trading venue.

So we match stocks via something called a combinatorial auction, which is new to capital markets, but it's not a new concept, and we are doing this for compute because compute is not the new oil.

It's an entirely new thing and it's going to be a bigger market, but it requires its own market structure.

So help me better understand this because there is a gap in the world of GPUs today.

You can rent them, but there are limitations.

So what does that actively mean and what is missing in today's market?

Price discovery is a big problem, and that really starts upstream with how do you finance and how do you get predictability off of the cash flows that are going to be coming off of GPUs, and that's the part that Juan Carlos is very focused on.

So we have commodities futures, certainly something that I'm familiar with our viewers are familiar with.

They may have even dabbled in these as investment products before.

What is the case for compute futures and what would that actually look like?

That's the really tricky part.

Since a barrel of oil had the same energy content and the same use cases in the 1980s as it does now.

Compute is not a standardization target in that way.

You need something more dynamic.

You actually need something that looks more like the MBS market, mortgage backed securities, if anything.

What do you, so talk to me, let's drill down on that, no pun intended, on what do you see actively in the world of MBS that you think could also be applicable to this conversation?

So what I see there is heterogeneity where home loans, they're not identical.

You can create an investable pool of assets that is something you can financialize, but it's pretty hopeless trying to box them into the same mold and compute is in the same situation.

It's not a barrel of oil.

It's something else.

And ultimately, why do you feel that one Chronos is uniquely well positioned to tackle the world of compute markets and everything else you're considering?

This is our core expertise and our background is academic mechanism design and financial markets.

So, the folks on our team have worked on some of the biggest new auctions and new markets like FCC Wireless Spectrum, which was another complex problem back in the 90s, computes a complex problem now, and we're very focused on delivering the right solution to it.

And I'm sure you're also focused on a lot of exciting things, Kelly, that you can't quite yet tell us.

Can you give us some sense under the hood.

Next for you and your colleagues on the team?

Yes, absolutely.

So we have some very cool stuff coming down the pipeline as far as how we actually bring these markets to bear and help accelerate the AI buildout, which is really what we're focused on big picture is just how do you get as much AI compute available so that we can all see the benefits of this in society.

Kelly Littlepage, founder, CEO of One Chronos, really grateful for your time.

Thanks for stopping by the show today.

Thanks for having me on.