Ornn

Financial Products for the AI Economy

Ornn is Building the Financial Layer for the AI Economy

As artificial intelligence reshapes the global economy, new challenges emerge. Lately, I’ve been considering the evolution of computing power (”compute”) and memory as tradable commodities.

​When I discovered Ornn, I was immediately intrigued by the company’s attempt to address this essential infrastructure challenge. Their goal: treat compute and memory as tradable financial assets, redefining these services in financial terms.

Ornn is becoming the “Financial layer for AI infrastructure.”

To achieve this, Ornn has created the first regulated market for compute and memory derivatives, aiming to foster trust and bring transparency and standardization to an opaque and idiosyncratic industry.

Solving the Pricing Problem

Ornn began from a simple observation: Compute is core to the global economy, but its market is underdeveloped. This challenge set the stage for Ornn’s approach.

While industries can easily reference the price of oil or electricity, there is no clean, shared way to discuss the price of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), such as Nvidia’s H100 model, which is a key piece of hardware for AI computations.

Ornn saw the compute market outpace its infrastructure, creating fragmented pricing and unique risks in long-term deals.

This opacity complicates price discovery and misprices capital, as operators and lenders lack trusted benchmarks for rapidly depreciating hardware.

Ornn’s Data-First Approach

To address the opaque landscape, Ornn’s strategy starts by creating a credible, transparent data layer. The company ensures accuracy by rejecting scraped offers, surveys, and estimates and instead building indices based on absolute, transaction-based pricing. This rigorous approach underpins the Ornn Compute Price Index (OCPI), the authoritative market reference price.

The team has launched live pricing indices for major GPU SKUs (stock keeping units, meaning specific models of GPUs), including:

• H100 and A100 (high-end GPUs by Nvidia)

• H200 and B200 (other advanced GPU models)

• RTX 5090 (a consumer and AI-capable GPU)

By recognizing that compute is not perfectly fungible (owing to hardware and location differences) but remains measurable, Ornn creates a standardized pricing reference. This fosters both market confidence and accurate asset valuation, further supporting the development of efficient markets.

The Team and Operations

In daily operations, Ornn’s team blends data science, market analysis, and product development. Much of their time goes into ingesting, cleaning, and normalizing real-world pricing data to refine the company’s methodology—steps that directly support their data-first approach. The company also experiences old-school market dynamics, engaging directly with brokers, data centers, and institutional counterparties to understand the practical, bespoke nature of compute financing and management.

Wayne Nelms (left) and Kush Bavaria (right)

Kush Bavaria, co-founder and CEO, is an MIT graduate with a background in both building software for semiconductor systems and investing in early-stage startups. He brought his passions together at Ornn to solve one of the most pressing problems in AI Computing today.

Wayne Nelms, co-founder and CTO, graduated from MIT alongside Kush, majoring in math and computer science. His background in quantitative finance, analyzing the markets’ largest semiconductor businesses, gave him early insight into the changing data center landscape.

To ground the platform in market reality, Ornn collaborates with advisors in legal, market structure, and AI infrastructure. These experts pressure-test assumptions on risk, contracts, and pricing to ensure operational robustness.

Financial Products for a Maturing Market

​To meet the needs of this ecosystem, Ornn offers cash-settled contracts, enabling market participants to transfer risk without physically trading GPUs. The platform supports stakeholders across the AI economy:

• Compute Providers: Can stabilize cash flows to finance new build-outs with greater certainty.

• Compute Buyers: Can lock in predictable costs for product launches and upcoming models.

• Lenders: Can reduce exposure to the underlying price risk of the assets they finance.

• Traders: Can take directional views on Compute as a commodity, adding exposure orthogonal to traditional assets.

A Regulated Future

Recognizing the shift in the trading environment from growth to capital efficiency and protection, Ornn emphasizes trust and compliance, leveraging a CFTC-regulated architecture with comprehensive KYC/AML protocols. As demand for computing power grows—much as oil and gas resources do—Ornn aims to be the premier integrity provider for the Compute landscape.