For the compute desk: procurement, capacity planning, trading
For the compute desk
Characterize, slice, price, forecast, schedule, bid, dispatch, verify, and settle — across the three kinds of contract a compute buyer holds. Where you employ a capacity planner or a compute buyer, the desk is their console. Where you employ nobody, the desk is the team: recording first, and acting only under written authority inside the limits finance set.
A · LONG-TERM PHYSICAL CONTRACTS
Annual leases and reservations
The purchase decision: the requirement written before any supplier is asked; a quote round on like terms; the counterparty checked as a creditor would; the acceptance test written into the contract; the decision record with the routes it rejected. Sized to measured demand, with the ramp, the prepayment, the exit, and the generation swap negotiated rather than discovered.
B · FINANCIAL CONTRACTS
Price exposure, and what would fix it
How much of the floating spend to fix, for how long, against which index — and the basis between that index and your own chip, region, and term. Always an overlay on a physical purchase. Today no listed contract has traded, the one live complex is a binary event market, forwards exist over the counter through brokers, and the accounting treatment is unresolved. The desk prices it; finance decides; nothing is offered until a contract trades.
C · SHORT-TERM CONTRACTS
Day-ahead and hour-ahead compute
The purchases that cannot wait: work above the commitment, work that can move, work with a deadline. Nine stages, from which work can move to what the invoice reconciled to. Recorded for ninety days — what the desk would have bid, to whom, and what would have moved — and placed only under a written delegated authority, inside your limits, against a project budget you named.
The nine stages, in both modes
| Stage | What it does | In the ninety days | Once you say so |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Characterize | Which of your work can move, weighted by spend. We ask your engineers once, and again when the logs show a family has changed | Live, with job logs | Live |
| 02 Slice | The work cut into pieces that can be priced apart, each with its requirement written first | Live | Live |
| 03 Price | Every supplier you would accept, at delivered cost: rate, egress at your rate, setup, rerun, measured throughput | Live | Live |
| 04 Forecast | What each piece costs this week, what next quarter costs, and the budget-at-risk | Live | Live |
| 05 Schedule | Where and when each piece should run, against the deadline, the risk limit, and the budget | A recommendation | The plan |
| 06 Bid | Each piece put to the qualified suppliers; the best offer that meets the constraints wins | Recorded, not placed | Live, inside your limits |
| 07 Dispatch | The work sent, and confirmed to have run | Recorded, not placed | Live |
| 08 Verify | The allocation tested on your own work; every invoice reconciled to the contract and the baseline | Live, from week 2 | Live |
| 09 Settle | Suppliers paid on measured delivery | — | Last. Not offered yet |
Underneath all nine, every supplier is qualified separately on identity, technical capability, security, and financial resilience, screened against the export-control lists, with your exposure capped, and asked in writing whether the desk may order on your behalf. A solver sits at the decision point, not a language model: the same inputs give the same answer, and every decision is reproducible from the record. Reproducible is not the same as right — the answer is as good as the contract reading, the characterization, and the quote underneath it, so each carries its source and its date.
In bursts, or as a standing function
ConceptualScroll the figure sideways →
Two answers, every day
The view: is there money here — the price gap, the movable share, the delivered-cost map, the commitment sized to measured demand. The readiness: can you act on it — the supplier through security review, the engineers’ confirmation, the budget named, the authority signed. The first moves with the market; the second with your organization, and it is the one that usually says not yet.
What a quote request from the desk carries
A named buyer with a confirmed window; one standardized requirement; a bounded response window and a quote expiry, with no use of the quote to pressure another seller; an agreed test on the actual allocation with a named payer; an objective acceptance condition with a remedy; confidentiality on the price and the result. Suppliers answer that. They do not answer a fishing expedition, and they are right not to.
The demo for this seat
Three screens, one per contract category: a twelve-month reservation taken from requirement to signed decision record; the price exposure with a hedge overlay priced for the day a contract trades, and the status of every instrument today; and the short-term flow on one campaign — characterize, slice, price, forecast, schedule, bid, dispatch, verify — ending in the $6,143 and the $945 kept apart. Novation Dispatch, the original eight-stage application, sits beside it.