Stan Hanks invented a commodities market for broadband while at Enron, and has well informed views on the need for a similar market for compute. The main challenge: units of compute are proving difficult to standardize. 

In this episode of Cool Vector, Stan Hanks of Kreneon, Wayne Nelms of Ornn, Hadassa Lutz of Cloud2Ground and host David Snow join Cool Vector to examine whether compute can be turned into a tradable commodity — drawing a direct line from Hanks' experience creating a broadband futures market at Enron to the emerging effort to do the same thing for GPU capacity. 

Compute has the economic conditions for a futures market — surging demand, volatile prices, massive capital at risk — but lacks the defining characteristic of a true commodity, which is fungibility. Workload built for one chip architecture can't simply be swapped to another. 

This fascinating conversation takes place as the one-year lease price of the H100 GPU has jumped nearly 40 percent between late 2025 and early 2026, and market players are now are racing to launch the first regulated compute futures products.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Token usage is opaque and hard to predict - Hanks compares tokens to a foreign currency where you don't know how much work you're actually getting — likening the experience to a parking meter that speeds up mid-session, demanding another quarter well before the hour you thought you'd paid for.

• Anthropic and ChatGPT are token 'price setters' - Nelms observes that the closed-source model providers — OpenAI and Anthropic — produce their own tokens and set their own prices, making the token market far less liquid and competitive than the GPU rental market where multiple neo clouds are offering access to relatively comparable hardware.

• GPU price fluctuations call for a futures market - The one-year lease price for the H100 GPU jumped 38.2% between October 2025 and March 2026, precisely the kind of volatility that Wayne Nelms argues a liquid futures market — with prices written into debt covenants and used as hedging benchmarks — would give infrastructure investors the tools to manage. 

• How Hanks created a broadband futures market while at Enron - By building his own fiber network to create a naturally long position, then standardizing both the buy-side and sell-side contracts around a common definition of bandwidth capacity, Stan used Enron's $20 billion treasury to move the market from bespoke, one-off bilateral deals toward something that looked and behaved like a commodity.

• Compute has a 'perfect opportunity' for commodity market mechanics - Han ks draws a direct parallel between the broadband boom of the late 1990s and today's compute buildout — massive capital being deployed into infrastructure without visibility into future demand and price — and argues that this information vacuum is precisely the condition under which commodity market mechanics have historically proven most valuable.

• Stan Hanks barely escaped the wreckage of Enron - At a famous analyst meeting in January 2000, Stan was presented with a transcript of promises made to the market about products that were pure science fiction, realized he would be asked to attest to their veracity, said he couldn't do it, and left the following Monday — narrowly avoiding a collapse that would eventually make him a DOJ witness for eleven years.

Access the full transcript and a searchable content library on the Cool Vector Substack.

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