The View from the Office.

I met up with Carmen Li, founder of Silicon Data and CEO of Compute Exchange, at her office in Battery Park to talk about the importance of calculating the cost of AI.

Silicon Data provides real-time GPU pricing benchmarks and indexes for AI compute. Compute Exchange runs an auction-based marketplace for GPU compute capacity.

The goal of the companies is to provide more visibility into the amount of money companies spend on AI solutions and lay the foundation for a market to hedge those costs.

Carmen’s story begins in Hangzhou, China, where she grew up. When she was 15, she was offered the chance to compete for a scholarship to study in Singapore. She took an exam and was awarded the stipend provided she accepted within one hour. She did.

She went to an all girls’ boarding school in Singapore where she had to maintain straight As or lose the financial support. Afterward she turned down a scholarship to attend the National University of Singapore in favor of studying in the U.S.

She majored in finance and computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduated during the global financial crisis, landing a position at DRW, the Chicago-based high-frequency trading firm. She started by building option valuation models and trading platforms and eventually started trading herself.

While at DRW she met founder Don Wilson who encouraged her to email him with trading ideas. Carmen said Don would often email back within 30 minutes, even on Friday nights. That relationship would prove to be pivotal for her career.

After five years at DRW, she left for Harvard Business School and then spent time at American Express and Citibank before joining Bloomberg to manage data partnerships with third party firms.

In March 2024, she ran into Don Wilson at a conference in Boca Raton and they discussed what was shaping up to be a critical issue in the world of AI, specifically that AI services were sold at fixed prices but the cost of compute was fluctuating wildly.

This is the structural problem facing every B2B SaaS company building on AI: Revenue is fixed, but the price of providing AI calculations is variable.

Don said compute could be the largest commodity of the next decade. He agreed to provide seed capital to build infrastructure needed to calculate and provide benchmark prices and indexes. She started Silicon Data in April 2024.

In March 2025, the company closed a $4.7 million seed round co-led by DRW and Jump Trading Group.

In October 2024, Carmen was asked to run Compute Exchange. Year to date, Compute Exchange has traded $500 million in notional contracts.

You can connect with Carmen on LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.