JD Durkin: Stephen Johnson, co-founder of OneChronos, here to talk about an IPO and a whole lot more. Good to see you.
Stephen Johnson: Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
JD Durkin: All right. So we just got Anthropic’s latest filing that puts its committed spending at nearly $900 billion. What do you make of that figure? What does that tell us specifically about the market for compute power right now?
Stephen Johnson: Yeah, it’s not a small figure, and that’s a reflection of the industry itself. The market for compute is driven right now enormously by credit and balance sheet, and that’s a really important fact for this IPO.
JD Durkin: But companies can be locked into paying for computing power whether or not they use it. Why isn’t there a way for them to protect themselves against changing prices or shifts that we may see in demand in the long run?
Stephen Johnson: Part of the issue is that compute is such a complex product. It’s not like oil, where a barrel of oil is the same regardless of where it is held, produced, ends up, or is used. Compute is not like that. The exact same chip can have very different performance qualities in different deployment contexts, so it’s not physically fungible. So the question becomes, can a marketplace pool together the like chips in their context and make them financially fungible?
JD Durkin: Yeah. And to your point, we have existing futures markets for energy, oil, gas, etc. Do you imagine that type of conversation picking up and having something comparable for compute in the near-term future?
Stephen Johnson: Yeah, for sure. There will at least be ways for people who hold compute risk to transfer that risk. Hedging is one way to transfer risk. There are other ways to transfer outright risk. And so I think there are going to be a lot of different marketplaces that emerge on different parts of the compute stack.
What we’re focused on right now is the financialization part: getting the people making those long-term commitments, like Anthropic, the people who are building the data centers and the cloud systems on the other side of that, and the lenders all together in the same marketplace, so that the loans and the offtake agreements can be priced all at the same time.
JD Durkin: I know a lot of this conversation is speculative because we’re still building out the infrastructure. What would a functioning compute market actually mean for the overall AI boom itself, do you think?
Stephen Johnson: Yeah, it means the capital can free up sooner in the life cycle. More investment can be made, and risk can move more quickly through the pipes. So rather than the risk reservoir getting too full in one spot, lenders can offload risk to insurance companies or other pools of capital. That can’t really happen until there’s a robust financial system in place for compute.
JD Durkin: So I’ve got less than a minute to go. Talk to me more about what OneChronos is building, how it’s different. When could trading begin for some of these things we’re talking about?
Stephen Johnson: Yeah. So we’ve been live in US equities, FX and European equities for a while now. Those are going great. Compute, hopefully in the next couple of months here, we’ll run an auction. But as you said, it’s all very early. The industry is very early, and almost the entire opportunity space is still available.
JD Durkin: Well, congratulations on all the success. Really grateful for your time, especially here on Election Day. Thanks for stopping by the show.
Stephen Johnson: Thank you very much.
