The Compute Bazaar: Tinkering with Compute Markets
A working notebook on compute markets — the marketplaces, protocols, and patterns for renting accelerators outside the hyperscaler model. We will touch on the substrate (whose silicon, where), the mechanics of how these markets actually clear, and what it feels like to push real workloads across someone else's network.
I The Substrate
Before there is a market there is the metal. The compute market sits on top of a substrate of GPUs, accelerators, and increasingly bespoke ASICs distributed across a long tail of operators: hyperscaler colocation tenants, sovereign clusters, research labs, crypto miners pivoting after the merge, and hobbyists with a single 4090 in a closet.
The shape of the substrate matters because it dictates what work fits. A single H100 with NVLink to seven peers behaves nothing like a stitched pool of 4090s on consumer PCIe; an A100 in a regulated European datacenter behaves nothing like an H100 in a Singapore basement. The market does not abstract this away — it routes around it, and the routing is a feature.
What we are buying, when we buy compute on these markets, is less raw FLOPs than a triple of silicon, locality, custody: the chip, where it physically sits, and who has root.
II The Markets
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III Tinkering
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IV Frictions and Futures
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Working notes. Will be revised as the workloads change.
