A financial glossary for the AI compute forward market.

Most people who arrive at an AI compute forward market arrive fluent in another one. They have priced crude, traded Treasury basis, or rolled equity-index futures, and they import that vocabulary wholesale. The problem is that the words almost fit. A forward on a complete OEM GPU system behaves like a forward on a barrel of oil right up until the moment the barrel starts losing value the day a newer barrel ships, and never recovers it. The carry is negative, the curve usually slopes the wrong way, and the thing being delivered is a named, serial-tracked, channel-compliant machine rather than a fungible grade.

This glossary defines the working terms of the AI compute forward market on their own terms. Each entry starts from the canonical commodities or equities definition, then states precisely how it changes when the underlying is a depreciating Blackwell or Instinct system delivered physically through a Rillor forward contract. If you only read one financial reference before transacting here, this is the one to read.

Contract structure

Forward contract

In the canonical regulator definition, a forward contract is a commercial cash transaction in which a buyer and a seller agree on delivery of a specified quality and quantity of goods at a specified future date, with terms more personalized than a standardized futures contract. That is exactly what a Rillor contract is. The "goods" are a named system, for example a Supermicro SYS-A22GA-NBRT or a Dell PowerEdge XE9680L carrying eight HGX B200 GPUs at 180 GB of HBM3e each. The "quality and quantity" are the SKU, the rack configuration, the CPU pairing (Intel Xeon 6980P or AMD EPYC Turin), the NIC generation (ConnectX-7 at 400G or ConnectX-8 at 800G), and the unit count. The "future date" is the delivery window.

The legally load-bearing element is intent to deliver. Under the CFTC facts-and-circumstances test, intent to deliver is what distinguishes a forward contract, which is excluded from both the swap and the futures definitions, from a cash-settled derivative. Every Rillor contract is written to deliver a physical machine, and the delivery actually happens. That is why it is a forward and not a future, and it is the reason this distinction is the single most important entry in this glossary. Treat it as the load-bearing line everything else hangs from: the contract is a promise to hand over iron, not a bet on a number.

Future

A future is a standardized, exchange-listed contract that is, in the AI compute context, cash-settled rather than physically delivered. Rillor does not list or operate futures. Instead, third-party venues license the Rillor Compute Index and build cash-settled futures and perpetuals against it. Those venues take the price risk; Rillor takes delivery risk off the table by always delivering iron. So when someone says they want to "trade the B300 future," they mean a downstream instrument referencing our index, not a contract we write. The two live side by side: physical forwards on the marketplace, cash-settled futures at licensed venues reading the index.

Physical settlement

Settlement is how a contract is discharged. On Rillor it is always physical and never cash. The mechanics are linear: at the delivery window the OEM ships the named SKU to the receiving facility, Rillor confirms receipt against the contract specification and the captured end-customer of record, and then the escrowed balance releases to the seller. There is no settlement price calculation, no daily mark, no final cash exchange standing in for delivery. The machine arrives or the contract defaults. This is the deliberate, non-negotiable core of the product: a Rillor forward exists to move a real machine from a verified seller to a verified buyer, and the absence of any cash-settlement path is the feature, not a limitation.

Money and credit

Deposit and escrow

The deposit is the buyer's at-execution commitment. On Rillor it is 10 percent of contract value, paid into an independent escrow at execution, with the balance due at delivery. Escrow here means a genuine third-party agent holding funds against defined release conditions, not a wallet or an internal ledger entry. The escrow cost runs roughly 1,000 dollars per contract, which on a multi-million-dollar eight-GPU system is a rounding line, and on a GB200 NVL72 rack-scale contract it is negligible against the notional. The release conditions are written into the contract up front, so neither side is trusting the other's good faith; they are trusting a neutral agent and a documented checklist.

Performance bond

In futures, "performance bond" is the exchange term for margin posted to guarantee a position. On Rillor it means something more concrete and one-sided toward delivery: a seller performance bond backs the seller's obligation to actually deliver the named machine. If the seller fails to deliver, the bond is the buyer's recourse. It converts a promise to ship into a financially backed promise, which is what lets a buyer plan a cluster buildout against a delivery date months out. The bond covers non-delivery and material spec deviation from the contracted SKU; it is the mechanism that makes a forward delivery date something a buyer can build a capital plan around rather than a soft expectation.

Curve and pricing

Spot

Spot is the price for immediate delivery. In compute, "immediate" is rarely truly immediate because in-stock systems are scarce, but spot is the reference for a machine you can take possession of now. It is the anchor the forward curve is measured against, the same role it plays in any commodity market.

Forward curve

The forward curve is the set of forward prices across delivery dates for one SKU. An upward-sloping curve (forward above spot) is contango; a downward-sloping curve (forward below spot) is backwardation. In storable commodities, contango is the normal state because holding the good costs money, warehousing fees plus the time value of money, and the forward has to compensate for that carry. AI compute breaks this. How the curve actually forms out of live contracts is covered in how a forward curve forms from real contracts.

Contango, backwardation, and the obsolescence delta

This is where borrowed intuition does the most damage. In oil or metals, the cost of carry is dominated by storage and financing, so the curve usually sits in contango. A GPU system has the opposite carry. Holding it does not cost a warehouse fee that pushes the forward up; it costs depreciation that drags the forward down. The dominant carry term is the obsolescence delta: the rate at which a SKU loses value as the next generation ships into the channel.

The numbers are not subtle. NVIDIA runs a roughly annual cadence (Hopper in 2022, Blackwell in 2024, and the next architecture queued behind it), and the secondary market reflects it. An H100 system in its third year of use recently resold for about 45 percent of a new H100's price, and values can fall 10 to 20 percent in a single quarter. Jensen Huang's own line, that once Blackwell shipped in volume "you couldn't give Hoppers away," is the obsolescence delta stated in plain English.

So in compute, backwardation is the normal state. A B200 forward for delivery nine months out typically prices below today's spot precisely because B300 will have substituted for some B200 demand by then. Contango, a forward above spot, signals genuine near-term scarcity for a SKU buyers cannot substitute away from. The slope is not a carry artifact; it is the market's live estimate of the obsolescence delta, and it is tradable. The practical upshot is that depreciation, which has always been the largest hidden risk in a GPU fleet, becomes an explicit, quotable number on the curve rather than a write-down a finance team discovers a year late.

Basis

Basis is the difference between the cash or spot price of a good and the price of the nearest futures contract for the same or related instrument. In the AI compute market the most useful basis is the spread between a single named SKU and the blended Rillor Compute Index. The index aggregates across active contracts for a SKU; an individual contract on, say, a Gigabyte G894-AD1-AAX5 with ConnectX-8 fabric and direct-liquid cooling will trade at a basis to that blend reflecting its specific configuration, delivery window, and counterparty. Basis is how you express a view that one config or one delivery date is rich or cheap relative to the SKU's consensus.

Roll

Rolling a position means offsetting an expiring contract and re-establishing the same exposure in a later period, usually executed as a single spread to reduce transaction cost versus legging out and back in separately. This is a downstream concept on Rillor. A physical forward holder does not roll; they take delivery. Roll cost is borne by the cash-settled venues that build futures and perpetuals on the index, where positions have to be carried forward across expiries. If you are trading the licensed instrument rather than taking iron, roll is a real line in your P&L; if you are buying machines, it is not your problem.

The index and the economics

Settlement feed and the Rillor Compute Index

A settlement feed is a defined, published reference-price methodology that other instruments settle against. Exchanges derive theirs from rules such as a volume-weighted average price over a defined close window, falling back to a bid-ask midpoint and then to an index-plus-carry calculation when no trades print. The Rillor Compute Index is our analogue: a 30-day rolling-blend forward price per SKU, computed from active Rillor contracts, owned and controlled by Rillor, and licensed as a settlement feed and API to exchanges, funds, and researchers.

The ownership point is the whole business. Because the index is computed from real, physically-settled contracts rather than surveys or quotes, it is anchored to actual delivery economics, which is also what makes it hard to manipulate. The index, not the marketplace, is the durable moat. The full computation, field by field, is documented in how the Rillor Compute Index is computed, so a prospective licensee can audit every input before referencing it. Venues that want to list a cash-settled product license the feed rather than rebuild it.

Take rate

The take rate is the platform's cut. Rillor's is 2 percent all-in, split 1 percent to the buyer and 1 percent to the seller, plus the roughly 1,000 dollars of escrow cost per contract noted above. There is no hidden spread and no markup buried in the price; the take rate is the take rate. Rillor is both the neutral operator of the venue and, separately, a seller and underwriter that seeds liquidity, so the same flat economics apply whether the counterparty is a third party or Rillor itself.

Channel of record

Channel of record is the AI compute market's version of know-your-counterparty, extended to the manufacturer's distribution rules. NVIDIA authorizes partners to distribute its products on a non-exclusive basis and reserves the right, on notice, to audit a partner's books and records pertaining to NVIDIA business. To satisfy that, every Rillor contract captures the end-customer of record, so the named buyer is documented for NVIDIA channel compliance from execution through delivery. This is also what makes a pre-delivery transfer to another KYC'd buyer possible with Rillor and OEM approval, since the channel record updates with the contract. The same record is what lets a forward position change hands cleanly before delivery without breaking the manufacturer's distribution rules.

How the terms fit together

Read end to end, the glossary tells one coherent story. A buyer and a verified seller agree a forward on a named SKU, for example a RIL-GX-B200-2T configuration, at a price set against the backwardated forward curve and at a basis to the Rillor Compute Index. The buyer posts a 10 percent deposit into independent escrow; the seller posts a performance bond. The end-customer of record is captured for channel compliance. At the delivery window the OEM ships the machine, Rillor confirms receipt, and the escrow releases the balance. No cash settlement occurs anywhere in that chain. Separately and downstream, the index that priced the contract is licensed to venues that build cash-settled futures and perpetuals, and they, not the physical holder, carry the roll.

Two pillars, both operating now: the physical forward marketplace for buyers and sellers who want the iron, and the index for the funds and exchanges who want the exposure. Access to both is invite only. If you are pricing a real buildout, the for-buyers and skus pages translate these terms into live SKUs and configurations.