The Programmable Data Center — Evan Conrad, SF Compute

SF Compute is building a marketplace for buying and selling GPU hours, modeled after commodity trading but with the key difference that the product delivered is actual computing capacity. Led by Evan Conrad, the company began by sub‑leasing clusters and has evolved to operate the full infrastructure needed for users to receive ready‑to‑run machines for their workloads. This “physical settlement” means that the buyer acquires not just a financial contract but also hardware with specific attributes: GPU generation, network configuration, memory, and interruption‑recovery policies.

To keep the market liquid, SF Compute matches orders with various constraints, enabling both spot and forward transactions and distinguishing between batch and real‑time inference. The firm argues that operational independence is essential, as major hardware vendors might have interests that could compromise a neutral exchange. Technical challenges include data‑center visits, cluster design, and the ability to elastically reconfigure InfiniBand fabrics.

The initiative matters because it opens the door to GPU resources without the large upfront investment that has historically limited many organizations, accelerating AI projects and innovation in compute‑intensive sectors. By introducing a physical settlement model, it also creates a price benchmark more closely tied to actual hardware costs, potentially stabilizing the long‑term computing‑resource market.

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