A new commodity class
Compute is a new commodity class. Your company is not yet organized for one.
Novation gives a compute-intensive company what it needs to plan, budget, buy, and hold its compute — and to manage its exposure to the commodity — while the teams that need compute get it. It starts with your contracts and your budgets, read-only, and it buys nothing until you tell it to.
A flat subscription, agreed in writing. Read-only, in your own tenancy, through what finance already holds. No purchasing authority is requested.
It already behaves like one
Prices that differ by supplier and move inside a year. Supply that sells out. Contracts the size of a treasury program.
7.1×
span of posted rates for the same class of chip across 53 providers on one day — 1.3–1.6× against a negotiated enterprise rate.
+20% · +15%
AWS Capacity Block price rises in January, July, and October 2026. CoreWeave raised prices about 25% in July.
Sold out
On-demand GPU capacity across chip types in April 2026; one-year H100 contracts up about 40% in five months.
$104B
CoreWeave’s backlog at 30 June 2026, on contracts it calls take-or-pay. Nebius: about 70% of its deals carried prepayments.
0 futures
Three published index families that disagree with each other, and no listed contract has traded: the first did not list on 5 October, and the CFTC extended its review to 9 November.
~75%
Snowflake’s third-party cloud, “including AI inference and GPUs,” as a share of its cost of product revenue, quarter to July 2026. Datadog’s cost of revenue was up 45% year on year in the June quarter.
Posted rates 4 September 2026; price changes July–October 2026; SemiAnalysis, April 2026; CoreWeave and Nebius second-quarter 2026 results; CFTC, October 2026; Snowflake and Datadog filings, 2026. Every figure on this site carries its date and source.
And it challenges the whole organization
Three groups feel it differently, and today none of them has the tool for its part.
THE TEAMS THAT USE COMPUTE
Budgets set once a year and exhausted in a quarter. 79% of finance leaders at companies of a thousand or more reported AI cost overruns last year; 56% of engineering leaders say AI budgeting is guesswork and 52% say nobody owns the cost. A request has no owner, and the work still has to run by Thursday.
PROCUREMENT AND THE COMPUTE DESK
Usually nobody whose whole job is the buying decision. Two decisions a year get a meeting; the weekly one — work above the commitment, with a deadline — goes to the incumbent’s on-demand rate by default. Requoting five suppliers is a week, qualifying one is 31–90 days, and one supplier can mean no supplier.
THE CFO, THE CONTROLLER, AND RISK
The commitments live in a spreadsheet and a footnote. Shortfalls true up in cash. Prepayments — 15–25% of contract value on CoreWeave’s own disclosed averages — are credit to the supplier, unsecured unless the contract says otherwise. Invoices arrive in different units, and the largest GPU cloud’s billing export carries no cost fields. Price exposure exists, and no instrument does.
Electricity, gas, and jet fuel each produced a desk, a back office, and a risk function once the spend was large enough that somebody had to own the decision and somebody had to own the exposure. Compute will too. The question is whether you build three disconnected ones, or one system.
What Novation is
Everything a compute-intensive company needs, on one record.
Plan and budget the spend. Hold the contracts, physical and financial. Buy and trade with a desk. Give every team a way to ask — and buy the work that must run first. It is to your compute what an ERP system is to your money, and what an energy trading and risk management system is to a utility’s power book — built in the order those were built, and read-only to start.
PLANNING AND BUDGETING
For the CFO’s office
Enterprise and project budgets, the forecast, commitment sizing, budget-at-risk, accruals and chargeback. The month closes from it.
CONTRACTS, PHYSICAL AND FINANCIAL
For the CFO and the head of risk
Every commitment and its drawdown, every invoice reconciled, supplier and price exposure, the limits — and financial contracts, when a listed one trades.
PROCUREMENT AND TRADING
For the dedicated team, or in its place
Characterize, slice, price, forecast, schedule, bid, dispatch, verify, settle — with the requirement written before any quote, across long-term, financial, and short-term contracts.
REQUESTS AND BUDGETS
For the teams that use compute
Ask against a budget, reserved at approval and debited when the work runs. See where it went, what it cost, and what is left.
The rule for the teams
The work that must run is bought first. Deadline, tolerance for interruption, priority, and minimum run are written down once, held against every job after that, and asked again when the job logs show a workload family has changed. The desk schedules to them, and retires your commitment first wherever the contract says that is the cheaper hour. Some days the answer is stay put — and that is an answer, on the record, with the alternatives it rejected.
A desk is somebody whose job is the buying decision
ConceptualWhere it starts
Read access to your bill, your contracts, and your budgets. Six things, from the second week.
CONTRACTS AND COMMITMENTS
Every floor, in one place
Each commitment with its counterparty, floor, ramp, term, expiry, prepayment, credits, rate card, and amendments; the pace it is retiring at against what actually ran; the shortfall or overflow it is heading for.
BUDGETS AND AUTHORIZATIONS
Authorized before it is spent
The enterprise compute budget and the project budgets; every request, who asked, who approved; the amount reserved when the work was authorized and the amount debited when it ran.
INVOICES, RECONCILED
Matched to the contract
Every invoice matched to its contract, its rate card, and its purchase order — and, for purchases the desk ran, to the requirement written before the quote. The exceptions come first, with the clause each one violates.
THE POSITION
Committed, forecast, consumed
By supplier, chip class, region, and term. What is above the floor and what it is costing. What expires when.
SUPPLIER EXPOSURE
Who holds your money
Prepayments outstanding, concentration by supplier, qualification status, and financial resilience — because a prepayment to a supplier is unsecured credit.
BUDGET-AT-RISK, AND THE DESK’S DELTA
With your job logs
The probability of breaching the enterprise or a project budget, and what drives it. And every day: what you paid, what the desk would have bid and where, what that would have cost delivered, and the difference, cumulative.
Built for a controller to close the month from, a treasurer to see the prepayments, and a project owner to see what is left. Every number says where it came from and what changed, and the whole record exports, because it is yours.
How the desk decides
One purchase, four routes, one decision. The cheapest rate card loses the piece that matters.
A funded campaign worked end to end: the requirement fixed before any quote, four routes priced at what the work would actually cost delivered, the one that cannot hold the deadline rejected for the training piece and kept on the page, and a decision your finance team can sign. The figures are invented; the shape is not.
One campaign, four routes, one decision
IllustrativeScroll the figure sideways →
Figures are invented to show the shape. What is not invented is the ordering: the cheapest rate card does not win the piece that matters. Supplier A’s $1.94 card delivers at $2.40 once transfer, setup, expected reruns, and the wait for a window are priced, and the reruns carry the eight-way training piece past the deadline, so it is rejected for training and used for the pieces that can be interrupted. The two savings figures are kept apart on purpose, and the second is measured against a route that holds the deadline: $6,143 is what the campaign was leaving on the table against the incumbent; $945 is what we added over Supplier A’s reserved tier, the best route a competent team with one second supplier could have reached alone. A route that misses the deadline is a rejected option, never a baseline. The ratio is this campaign’s, not the market’s; on your fleet both numbers are measured, never assumed.
Why the rejected routes stay on the page. A decision record keeps what it did not choose, with the numbers it was judged on, so the choice can be audited later against what actually happened. A sales deck deletes them. That difference is most of what we sell.
Against your incumbent
$6,143
What the campaign was leaving on the table, including anything you might have found without us. This is the purchasing opportunity, and it is what our published model prints on a fleet.
What we added
$945
The gain over the best route you could have reached alone — a route that holds your deadline, or it would not be the baseline. This is the number our fee has to be judged against, and it appears on every decision we deliver. Most of it came from a question nobody had asked. The ratio is this campaign’s, not the market’s.
Across the organization
Prioritize, manage the interdependencies, and see the same number from every seat.
ONE POSITION, NOT TEN SPREADSHEETS
Committed, forecast, and consumed across every team and every supplier. The floor is retired first wherever the contract makes that the cheaper hour, whichever team’s work retires it. What runs above the floor is priced at what it actually added to the bill, and the team that caused it can see that it did.
PRIORITY, WRITTEN DOWN
An order you set, not one we infer: by default, deadline-bound work before movable work, staging before training, training before evaluation, with customer commitments and revenue-bearing work ranked where you put them. The risk limit and the budget as hard bounds. The same three constraints on every purchase — timing, risk, market — inside the limits finance set. Conflicts stop and wait for a named person.
VISIBILITY, AND SCALE
The controller, the treasurer, FP&A, the head of risk, the desk, the project owners, and the executive each open the same record and read it by role. Agents multiply tokens per task 10–100×; the stages run every day on every job, and the headcount does not grow with the spend.
The solver decides the same way every time from the same inputs, and every decision is reproducible from the record — which is the only way a priority holds across organizations rather than across a meeting.
Read further
Every claim here is checkable, and the model is open, so you can run it on your own numbers before you talk to us.
Who it is for
For the CFO’s officePlanning and budgeting, contract management — physical and financial — and the exposure stated together: supplier, concentration, budget, and price. Counterparty credit risk stated as a creditor would. Read-only from the second week.For the compute desk: procurement, capacity planning, tradingCharacterize, slice, price, forecast, schedule, bid, dispatch, verify, and settle — across long-term physical contracts, financial contracts, and short-term day-ahead and hour-ahead compute. A desk whether or not you staff one.For project teamsAsk once, against a budget. Novation characterizes and slices the work so the desk can buy what it needs, reserves the budget at approval, and tells you where the work ran, what it cost, and what is left.DemosOne demo for each seat — the CFO’s record, the compute desk across three contract categories, and project-team requests — plus the original eight-stage Novation Dispatch application. Invented data, behind an email code at demo.novation.ai.How the record and the desk workThe record first: contracts, budgets, and invoices, from the second week. Then nine stages — characterize, slice, price, forecast, schedule, bid, dispatch, verify, settle — and why it works whether you buy bilaterally, from a marketplace, at auction, or financially.Whether it pays
The problemSeven jobs nobody in your building holds all at once: see what you actually pay, hold every commitment in one place, authorize compute before it is spent, compare two suppliers on the same terms, look past your incumbent, say which of your work could move, and reconcile the invoice and prove the decision was right.The methodA saving that cannot be reconciled to an invoice is not a saving, and a record that cannot be audited is not a record. The arithmetic, the three baselines kept apart, the baseline written before the decision, and the grid showing where this fails.Your alternativesYou have eight other options and one of them is often the right answer. Moving the same work to your incumbent's own interruptible tier captures about a third of our number, at close to zero integration cost and no fee.Engagement & pricingA flat annual subscription on the spend the record administers. No share of savings, and why. Design partners pay the floor in year one. Execution only under a written authority, for a fixed fee. Settlement is not offered.NetworkNovation has no signed supplier agreements, deliberately. The suppliers you have qualified are the network — and we screen them for financial standing and prepayment exposure as well as contract, security, and hardware.Before you commit
What we don't claimGPU-hours are not interchangeable, the interconnect test is not free, a record is not a saving, no compute hedge has traded, and moving a running job between clouds is not a feature. The objections we could not talk our way out of.Security, confidentiality & liabilityYour payload data never transits us. The record and the desk are read-only in your own tenancy under scoped credentials you issue; a SOC 2 Type I report and an independent penetration test precede the first paid subscription, Type II the first renewal; execution is earned rather than sold, and the audit trail lives with you.About Novation — what exists todayWhat exists today, what happens next, how we treat a number, and who is behind it.InsightsWorking papers on how the compute market actually clears. Every figure carries its source, its window, and its caveat in the same breath.Three ways to startFrom least access to a live pilot: a back-cast on one redacted purchase, a sandbox record from redacted exports, or scoped read-only access in your own tenancy. Each produces a record you keep; none takes purchasing authority or seller money. Nothing changes until you approve it.Start here
Give the record read access, and read what it holds.
Give the record read access to your bill, your contracts, and your budgets, and put the people who run your scheduler in the first meeting. Within two weeks it shows you a first position: every commitment you have given it with its drawdown, every project budget against its spend, every invoice it can match, and — listed beside them — what it could not yet match, with the coverage stated. We agree a fixed subscription in writing, and a baseline.
Then give the desk your job logs and an hour with your engineers. For ninety days it watches, and every day it shows you what it would have bought, where, and what that would have cost, next to what you paid. You approve any purchase and keep the contracts.
Nothing changes until you approve it. The first year is read-only, in your own tenancy. We take no money from any compute seller.
Or see the method first
Give us a purchase you have already made and we will re-run the decision as it stood at the time. Historical alternatives are unobserved, so that is a diagnostic rather than a saving — and it is free for our first design partners, in exchange for permission to publish the anonymized result.