Commodifying compute

Buying cloud capacity still feels like a guessing game. One vendor labels its box "c6a.2xlarge," another rents out "A100-80G MIG slices," yet neither sticker hints at what a 10-second AI inference or a two-hour simulation will actually cost in usable performance.

Sub-second cold-starts, memory quirks, and uneven scaling lurk between the lines, turning price sheets into labyrinths and leaving a huge share of the compute, both existing and future, idle on the data-center shelf.

To treat compute like any other commodity, for example kilowatt-hours or bushels of wheat, we need one trusted yardstick. Enter the Standard Compute Unit (SCU): a metric that fuses familiar benchmarks and tempers them with real-world efficiency and scaling penalties, so one SCU on Provider A delivers the same work as one SCU on Provider B. The idea isn't radical; it's simply rigorous, open standardization.

Armed with a common unit, buyers comparison-shop by price per SCU and know exactly what they're getting, while sellers, from hyperscalers to edge nodes, can list spare cycles without inventing new SKUs. The upshot is a leaner, smarter market: less guesswork, fairer pricing, and far more of humanity's compute, the fuel for tomorrow's super- intelligence, brought online through a single, global exchange.