Pantera Partner Jay Yu Predicts Compute Power Could Become a Commodity Asset in 5–10 Years

ChainCatcher report: Jay Yu, Associate Partner at Pantera Capital, published an article titled "The Rise of Compute Markets," stating that compute and data center spending have become a trillion-dollar category, yet GPU procurement remains largely conducted through group chats, over-the-counter brokers, and bilateral agreements. He noted that compute financialization is still in its early stages, constrained by SKU, time, and location, but could evolve over the next 5 to 10 years into a commodity asset akin to electricity or oil. Jay Yu believes the compute market may develop a structure similar to the power grid’s “grid-operator-node” model—“hardware-supplier-cluster”—with new cloud providers acting as structural short sellers of GPUs, while on-demand platforms and application layers serve as long positions. He noted that for every $100 spent by the application layer on inference, approximately $45 flows to the on-demand layer, $50 to new cloud or GPU providers, and $5 to routing layers such as OpenRouter. NVIDIA can be viewed as the “central bank” of compute, having announced up to 25% residual value support. He also stated that physical delivery offers a more durable moat, with indices, cash-settled exchanges, and financing tools expected to follow, with participants including SF Compute, Vast AI, Runpod, and Compute Exchange. The compute market lacks mandatory price transparency, potentially leading to greater basis risk.