Portrait No. 001
Carmen Li
Founder and CEO
Silicon Data & Compute Exchange
Raised — $14M
Silicon Data builds the financial infrastructure for the global compute economy. AI compute is already a multi-billion-dollar market, yet it lacks the transparency and benchmarks that exist in mature commodities like energy or interest rates. We solve this by creating financial-grade datasets and indices for GPU markets, including SiliconIndex, which tracks global GPU rental prices, and SiliconMark, an independent benchmark measuring real performance of rented cloud GPUs. Together with our sister platform Compute Exchange, we enable price discovery and lay the groundwork for derivatives markets around compute. Before founding Silicon Data, I spent years working in financial data and markets. I was struck by how the most important input powering AI—compute—had almost no reliable pricing or performance transparency. Companies were spending millions on GPUs without knowing what they were truly getting. When we began benchmarking GPUs and saw performance vary dramatically across providers, it became clear the market was broken. I started Silicon Data because I couldn’t stop thinking about how much better this market could work.
In her words
“Sometimes there are no rules and no market — that’s the fun part: you get to create both.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Building Silicon Data has been one of the most fun and demanding experiences of my life. The hardest chapter came when I stepped into the CEO role for two startups at the same time—Silicon Data and Compute Exchange—while raising two young kids and trying to protect my own mental health. From the outside, people often see only a small slice of the challenges. They see product launches, datasets, or partnerships. What they don’t see is the constant pressure of sales, competitors trashing your work or copying it, and the responsibility of building a market that didn’t exist before. At the same time, I have to show up strong—for my team and for my family—even on days when the weight feels overwhelming. As a founder, you’re often carrying a world of problems that nobody else can see. But grit compounds. What began as a contrarian idea—that compute should trade like a financial asset—now has real momentum. We’ve built the first GPU price indices, benchmarked thousands of GPUs globally, and our data is referenced in prediction markets and conversations about compute derivatives with major exchanges.
Chapter II
Your vision.
How does compute become a true economic asset? Today AI runs on GPUs, but the market around them is primitive. Prices are opaque, performance is inconsistent, and there are almost no tools for risk management. Imagine an AI company spending tens of millions on compute with no equivalent of an oil benchmark, electricity market, or interest rate curve. That’s the gap we’re closing. Silicon Data is building the measurement layer for the compute economy — price indices, performance benchmarks, and eventually financial instruments that allow companies to hedge and allocate compute capital efficiently. If we succeed, compute will become a fully financialized market. AI builders will be able to buy, sell, hedge, and price compute with the same sophistication that energy traders manage power grids. And that will unlock the next phase of the AI economy.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Thirty years from now, I hope people take transparent compute markets for granted the same way we take interest rate benchmarks or energy markets today. If Silicon Data succeeds, compute will be priced, traded, and risk-managed like any major economic input, helping AI grow more efficiently and responsibly. Personally, I hope my journey shows other women—especially mothers—that you don’t have to choose between building something ambitious and building a family. The path will be hard and sometimes lonely, but it is possible. If even a few more women feel empowered to step into leadership and shape industries, that will be a legacy I’m proud of.