When we spoke to DRW's Don Wilson last year, he talked about building out a GPU market that might be bigger than oil. Now, a year later, he is working with Carmen Li to do just that. Li is the CEO of two companies — Silicon Data and Compute Exchange (where she works alongside Wilson). The former company is building the index for GPU pricing while the latter is a spot marketplace for GPU procurement. Today's episode — recorded at our live show at City Winery in New York — gets into how Li is building a whole new market for GPUs at her two companies. We talk about the challenge of standardizing compute, GPU price volatility, if used GPUs are like used cars, what goes into constructing a GPU index, and what it means to win the GPU lottery. Read more:Jane Street Plans New Data Center as Computing Power Runs ScarceSpaceX Inks $30 Billion Computing Power Deal With Google Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anjney Midha wrote the first check to Anthropic. He teaches a viral course at Stanford on how AI works. And he was, until recently, a partner at a16z. In other words, he is AI-industry royalty. Midha's new project is AMP PBC, a company that believes it can radically lower the price of compute. To accomplish that, he is working on building a compute grid that turns GPUs into a standardized utility. But right now, compute is too fragmented. It's too heterogeneous. And given the way contracts are structured, he says that labs are being forced to spend money on capacity that often goes unused. In other words, small labs are forced to pay up for big, long-term contracts, even though their own demand (particularly during model training) may be very spiky. On this episode, Midha explains how the market for compute currently works and why he believes there's a software solution that could significantly improve compute utilization. He also tells us why he does not anticipate one company will emerge as the dominate player and that instead we'll have a wide range of models, each optimally used in specific applications. Read more:Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5 Billion Gallons of WaterOracle Falls Most in Six Months on Mounting Data Center Costs Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The hay market is not a transparent market: It is very fractured by types of hay, whether it is alfalfa or clover hay. There are a few opaque, illiquid markets like this — scrap metal for instance — that require some hands-on investigating to figure out. Aiden Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the HayWire newsletter, which aims to make the hay market more transparent: He and co-founder Cole Glasgow use an AI model to mine public data sources — like USDA reports on auction prices across different regions — to produce a weekly newsletter on the hay market. On this episode, we speak with Johnson as he explains why he chose hay over other kinds of markets, how HayWire was made possible through vibecoding, networking with hay farmers, why the ROI of owning a horse is dropping with hay prices spiking, and why hay demand keeps on tightening.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In April, the price of tomatoes was around $2.69 per pound — the highest seen in some four decades. And tomatoes aren't the only food getting more expensive. From cauliflower to lettuce, fresh produce is spiking all over the place. So what's driving the price spike? And what can tomatoes teach us teach about America's political economy including changes in trade and tariffs? Our guest today is Jacob Krempel, senior vice president of procurement and merchandising at the wholesale food distributor Baldor, and an expert in securing fresh produce. We talk to him about where America's tomato supply actually comes from, why consumers are paying more and more, how restaurants navigate price fluctuations, and the influx of novel new tomato varieties. Read more:The Recipe for a Power Restaurant Has ChangedThe Latest Snack Innovations Are Basically Just Creamsicles and Chex Mix Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When we last spoke to Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer of cloud company CoreWeave, his business was not yet public and sourcing GPUs was a key constraint on growth. But three years later, things look pretty different. CoreWeave IPOed and has been raising money in the bond market too, as well as signing more deals with chipmaker Nvidia. In fact, investors have basically been throwing money at all-things-AI. But there are persistent bottlenecks to further growth. Chip supply is still scarce, but so are transformers and electricity. In this episode, we catch up with Brannin on everything he's seeing in the market for compute right now, including leases, Nvidia's new Vera Rubin systems, demand for training versus inference, and the possibility of standardizing the market for compute. Read more:Trump Officials Worry US Loophole Let Chinese Firms Buy Nvidia Blackwell ChipsBroadcom Slides Most Since January 2025 on AI Outlook Miss Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Prediction markets that enable you to bet on pretty much everything are everywhere nowadays. But there's still a big question over whether they can expand to include larger institutional investors like hedge funds. Part of the problem is that a lot of prediction market contracts are illiquid and trading volumes can sometimes be shallow. That's where trading firm Susquehanna International Group comes in. In this episode, recorded live at New York's City Winery, we talk to Jeremy Maletz, Susquehanna's head of macro trading and prediction markets, about the firm's market-making business with Kalshi. We talk about how big investors could use prediction markets, what Susquehanna is seeing in terms of flows, how a market-maker hedges risk on these contracts, and how it makes money from them.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today’s episode, which was recorded at our recent live show at New York’s City Winery, follows up on a conversation we had with Iain Dunning, head of AI at Hudson River Trading. Last year, we talked about how his firm uses AI. Now, some seven months later, we follow up on how one of the biggest market makers around is deploying this technology. We talk about the price of memory, bottlenecks in compute, how much HRT employees are actually spending on tokens, why the firm might develop its own chips, as well as AI-induced delirium. Read more:Jane Street Plans New Data Center as Compute Power Runs ScarceNvidia-Backed Robotics Startup Generalist AI Valued at $2 Billion Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's a lot of debate about the future of AI — not just whether it will produce the returns investors are expecting, but also if AI will lead to mass worker displacement. Big banks are the perfect prism through which to explore some of these questions. Not only are they deploying AI very quickly, but they have a wide range of workers who are using the technology, from back-office employees to junior analysts to the most senior investment bankers. In this episode, we speak with David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, about the impact of AI on the banking business, and why he does not predict a major white collar wipeout. We talk about the outlook for headcount, current conditions in capital markets, and the bank's role in the upcoming SpaceX IPO and Alphabet's historic equity capital raise. He also tells us about his early career in junk bonds and (because of his love of electronic dance music) how AI is transforming music production. Read: Anthropic Picks Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs to Lead IPO Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We talk about the commodity supply chain all the time. We talk about the ports and the trucks and the ships and all of that. But there's another dimension to moving commodities all around the world, which is actually paying for it. Who funds the oil tanker and what happens when that tanker is, say, stuck in the Strait of Hormuz? Commodity finance underpins production, transportation and storage of a wide variety of the things that make the modern world, but you tend to only hear about it when things go wrong. Today we speak with Lewis Hart, head of corporate advisory and banking at Brown Brothers Harriman. We discuss how the business of commodity finance actually works, how risk is priced, what makes for a good or bad warehouse, and the difference between financing a commodity you can hedge (like oil) versus one where's there's no futures market (like cashews). Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was it developed and what were the big breakthroughs in its history? On this episode, we speak with Tim Queeney, the author of the recent book Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. He walks us through the history of the technology, and its ongoing evolution, including how it might one day allow to build an elevator into outer space. Read more:Japan Cablemaker Rout Exposes Cracks in AI Infrastructure RallyWhy Huawei’s New Chipmaking Plan Has Investors Buzzing Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.