How the record and the desk work

The record first: contracts, budgets, and invoices, held from the second week through read access to what finance already owns. Then nine stages. Six run read-only once your job logs are in: the desk characterizes, slices, prices, forecasts, schedules, and verifies. Two — bidding and dispatch — are recorded rather than placed until you sign a written authority. The ninth, settlement, is last and is not offered.

The record and stages 1 to 4 and 8 are the part almost nobody has, and they are what we sell. A buyer running 5 to 7 without them owns a router rather than a desk, which is the boundary between us and the cross-cloud provisioning tools that already exist. Where you run one, we are the party telling it where to route.

The figure walks through the eight stages the desk runs. The ninth, settlement — paying suppliers on measured delivery — is last, is not offered, and sits beneath the record rather than inside the desk.

You get two answers, not one

A desk does not produce one answer. It produces two, and it keeps them apart — a discipline borrowed from energy trading, where a desk can hold a constructive view on a market and still decline to put the trade on because timing has not confirmed.

Which makes “not yet” a real answer rather than a failed sale. A desk that converts every constructive view into a purchase is a sales motion, and keeping the two questions apart is the only way you can tell the difference.

An agent, in both senses of the word

In the older sense, an agent acts for a principal, in the principal’s interest, and is paid by the principal. In the newer sense, an agent perceives its environment, decides under constraints, acts through tools, and observes what happened. We do both. The part that matters is what sits at the decision point. Most software that buys things on your behalf will put a language model there. We put a solver there — the same inputs produce the same schedule, every time, reproducible from stored inputs. The language model only reads unstructured quote replies and contract clauses into typed fields, with a confidence score and the page each came from, and drafts explanations of decisions already made. It never decides. That is necessary for a saving to be reconciled to an invoice, though not sufficient: the versioned record of inputs, approvals, and outcomes, and the baseline written before the decision, are what make the reconciliation auditable.

We buy in whatever market exists

The market for compute is not one market and probably will not become one. Most of it is still bilateral: you ask suppliers, you take quotes, you sign contracts. Some is listed on marketplaces, and a few of those let you resell what you no longer need. Futures are pending: the CME contracts did not list on 5 October 2026 as planned — the CFTC extended its review to 9 November, citing “novel or complex issues,” having written in its August request for comment that it “preliminarily believes that compute may not yet exhibit certain of the characteristics of commodities” — and ICE has published specifications with no date. Those forms will coexist for years, the way they have in oil for four decades.

So we price all of them and compare across them in the same units: a quote from a supplier you have qualified, a marketplace listing, an auction clearing price where one exists, a financial contract that fixes your price without delivering a chip, and the capacity you have already paid for and have not used. Nothing we sell you depends on a compute exchange ever working. If one works, we use it as another source of price and the job gets easier. Until one does, your hedge is the commitment, sized to measured demand — and when one does, a cash-settled contract is an overlay on a physical purchase, never a substitute for one, because it cannot finish a training run.

07 · Dispatch and settlement Demo

The execution flow below is the working demonstration on invented data. During a watch these stages are recorded and not placed. They go live only once four things exist in writing: a delegated authority with limits and a named project budget, security evidence you have accepted, liability terms including what we owe when the error is ours, and a record long enough that you have seen the desk call the market right — and seen it say stay put. And a fifth, per supplier: written confirmation that the desk may order on your behalf. Where the terms say it may not — AWS Capacity Blocks, since 1 October 2026 — the desk prepares the order and you submit it.

What we build, and what we never build