Two recent MIT graduations have launched “the S&P 500 for compute” in order to allow digital infrastructure market participants to better hedge against price fluctuations.
Having graduated last year, Kush Bavaria, Co-Founder and CEO, and Wayne Nelms, Co-Founder and CTO, launched ORNN as an index fund for components necessary for compute fed into the infrastructure. Nelms spoke with Cool Vector on the sidelines of the DCD New York event in March.
“If compute costs drop too much, [vendors] go underwater,” Nelms told Cool Vector. “So they sell futures. And then enterprises, if compute costs rise too much, they pay a lot in cost. So they want to put a ceiling, so they buy futures.”
Among the key takeaways from Nelms’ Cool Vector interview:
• Compute is a financeable asset class. Ornn has built the first futures market for GPU compute — the Ornn Compute Index (OCPI), listed on Bloomberg — giving data center operators and enterprises a mechanism to hedge cost exposure the way commodity markets hedge oil or grain.
• Residual value guarantees unlock better debt financing. By committing to buy back GPU hardware at a fixed percentage of cost after three years, Ornn gives lenders confidence that collateral won’t depreciate to zero, which directly lowers borrowing costs for data center operators.
• The index is a leading indicator, not a lagging one. Ornn’s data reacts to supply chain shocks — export restrictions, wafer shortages, geopolitical news — before headlines break, making OCPI a meaningful alternative data source for hedge funds and asset managers.
• Capacity constraints, not demand, are the binding limit on digital infrastructure growth. Every conversation Wayne has in the market returns to the same refrain: builders want to move now but can’t get power, land, or GPUs — and until that supply gap closes, the tailwind for the entire sector remains intact.
Access the full transcript and an archive of searchable content on the Cool Vector Substack: https://coolvector.substack.com/p/mit-grads-build-s-and-p-500-but-for
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