The ex-Citi VP at the heart of GPU trading: "We're growing 200% every six months"
Carmen Li has had an atypical trading career. Instead of starting out at a bank and moving to a hedge fund, she began her career at an electronic trading firm (DRW), moved to a bank (Citi) and then founded a start-up. Now she's chief executive of both that start-up (Silicon Data) and of Compute Exchange, the new exchange for used and refurbished GPUs (Graphics Processing Units).
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Compute Exchange launched in January 2025. It was co-founded by Don Wilson, the former Chicago pit trader who co-founded DRW back in 1992. In November 2024, Wilson informed the Financial Times that he thought GPUs and "compute" would become the biggest commodity in the world. Last September, Wilson told Bloomberg that as the GPU market develops, it will become possible to create GPU-related futures contracts. "I envision that these will be traded kind of like electricity futures, where there's one for every month, and if you want to hedge the next three years, you sell thirty six of them and now you've locked in your pricing," Wilson added.
This is where Silicon Data comes in. Silicon Data creates publicly available indices based on 280,000 datapoints that can be used to price GPU futures. Li was already involved in GPU index creation, and so when Wilson wanted a CEO for Compute Exchange, she was a natural choice. "I already knew him from my time at DRW," Li explains.
Compute Exchange doesn't own GPUs, but is the equivalent of an electronic market maker in the units, which underpin AI computing capacity. "We list the inventories that are available and when a request comes in we will dynamically ping the providers. They will give a price and the client will get a full specification back," says Li. "It's not just about price but actual performance and things like thermal latency degradation."
None of the GPUs listed are new, but Li says this doesn't matter. GPUs last longer than people think and as the software improves they will last longer still. Refurbished GPUS are also available at shorter notice than new ones. "You can wait six months for a B300 [Nvidia's new chip]," she says. Refurbished chips are available almost immediately.
Li was a senior VP in working capital products at Citi, but left the bank in 2022. She claims to be having a lot of fun in her new existence. Notional trading volume is growing 200% every six months at Compute Exchange and Li says she's at the heart of something special: "I love working on these products. We are trying to bring transparency to the whole GPU ecosystem."
Other people in financial services are also looking for a slice of this fun. Li says both Silicon Data and Compute Exchange employ engineers with backgrounds from Millennium and elsewhere. She's hiring human data engineers even though agentic agents are dealing with a lot of the flow. "We want to make sure it's all done properly," Li explains.
What Li won't be hiring are sales or marketing professionals. She doesn't need them. "There are zero salespeople at Silicon Data," she explains. "We have no sales people, zero paid ads and no marketing dollars. We just pride ourselves on being the best for compute, and if you google anything about GPU pricing you will see us and our benchmarks." This seems to be a good approach: revenues have increased 5x in the past two months.
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