Episode summary
The Future of Compute, Data Centers, and AI
How I Invest With David Weisburd
· · 22 min · Hosts: David Weisburd · Guests: Kush Bavaria
Summary
Kush Bavaria argues that AI compute is becoming a national strategic commodity, comparable to oil or electricity, and says it needs a liquid market that can let buyers hedge price and supply risk. He says Oren was built to create that market, especially for inference providers and other buyers whose demand is spiky and hard to predict. In his view, compute will become one of the largest enterprise costs over the next 5 to 10 years, making derivatives and futures more important for AI infrastructure.
He sketches the AI stack as applications, model companies, infrastructure providers, data center builders, and energy companies, and says the real constraint is increasingly energy and power access. Kush says there is still intense demand for chips and data center capacity, pointing to old GPU generations staying fully rented and to H100 pricing that remains near new levels. He expects more data centers to come online on Earth over the next couple of years, while orbital data centers are still roughly a decade away.
Kush also frames the race as geopolitical, arguing that America needs to keep building because China is already investing heavily in data centers and models. He says U.S. capital markets are a core advantage and that Oren’s index uses transaction data rather than indicative quotes so it reflects ground truth. He describes the company’s rapid growth, its 7 trillion market projection, and the importance of hiring, fast customer response, and using AI coding tools.
Key takeaways
- Kush Bavaria says compute is becoming a national strategic commodity and should have a market built around it.
- He argues Oren serves buyers with spiky demand, especially inference providers that need short-term hedging for compute.
- Kush says demand for compute is still outpacing supply, with old chips fully rented and H100 servers still near new pricing.
- He believes energy and power access, not capital, is the biggest bottleneck for new data center buildouts in the U.S.
- Kush says America’s capital markets are the key advantage in the AI race and should be used to create capital markets for compute.
Notable quotes
“It's a national strategic commodity that needs to be treated that way. It needs to have a market built around it”
“The reason is we think compute is going to become the next commodity of the future”
“Compute will become the largest cost for any enterprise in the next 5, 10 years in the future”
“The demand right now for compute is so large that supply just isn't there”
How the episode opens
You look at Venezuela, for example, they have the largest oil reserves. You take that away, the government starts collapsing. And I think the same way is true for compute going into the forward. It's a national strategic commodity that needs to be treated that way. It needs to have a market built around it.
You're trying to size the market. How do you go about sizing market like compute? — The projection, 7 trillion. If you take a look at the world today, where is most of the money being poured into? It's all in data centers. Every single sovereign wealth fund, every single private equity firm, any person with capital has investment somehow into a data center project. And that just shows the sheer amount of construction that we are going to be doing in the next few years.
Kush, you're founder and CEO of Oren, and you created an exchange for data compute. Why create that?
We basically created exchange for compute. The reason is we think compute is going to become the next commodity of the future. Every enterprise today, and if you look back 100 years from now, everything was powered by oil, right?
The clothes you wear, most of the enterprises, the largest ones, were powered by some sort of form of oil, whether that's jet fuel or a crude oil or any refined form of that. And I think today the largest economic input for our society is going to be compute, and whether that's as usage of like AI or different tools off of that. So, we think there needs to be a liquid market that exists for compute the same way it exists for any other commodity.
Commodity markets in general exist mostly for people to hedge away the risk of the commodity.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- ai compute as commodity
- gpu capacity pricing
- ai data centers and energy constraints
- compute futures and derivatives
- ai capital markets and startup building
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Ornn
- AlphaSense
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Andreessen Horowitz
Watch the episode
Watch “The Future of Compute, Data Centers, and AI” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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How I Invest With David Weisburd, this episode and its artwork belong to David Weisburd. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
