What Brent, Henry Hub, and the LBMA gold price teach a compute index.

Every durable commodity benchmark answers the same three questions before anyone trades against it. What exactly is being priced. At what moment is the price fixed. Who owns the number. Brent answers them with a basket of North Sea crude grades and a 16:30 London assessment window. Henry Hub answers them with a single physical delivery point in Louisiana. The LBMA Gold Price answers them with a twice-daily auction whose intellectual property the London Bullion Market Association controls outright. None of these markets started as a price. They started as a thing precise enough to quote.

AI compute hardware has now reached the same threshold. A complete OEM GPU system, an HGX B300 node or a GB300 NVL72 rack, is a fungible, spec-defined unit with recurring forward demand and a measurable depreciation curve. That is the full commodity test, and compute passes it. The Rillor Compute Index is built by reading the same playbook that energy and metals wrote decades ago, taking the parts that travel and rejecting the one part that does not.

Brent: a basket with a clock

Brent is widely described as the global oil price, but that phrasing hides the real machinery. The benchmark is BFOET, a physical basket of light North Sea crude grades (Brent, Forties, Oseberg, Ekofisk, Troll, with WTI Midland added in 2023), and it establishes the price for roughly 80 percent of internationally traded crude. The market does not quote a single well. It quotes a defined set of deliverable grades, and the most competitive grade on a given day sets the assessment.

The second half is the clock. Dated Brent reflects the tradable, repeatable spot value of that most competitive grade, assessed at precisely 16:30 London time and compiled by S&P Global Platts through the Market on Close process. The assessment window is the entire point. Without a fixed moment, no two counterparties would agree on which print to settle against, and contracts referencing the benchmark would dissolve into argument.

The Rillor Compute Index is built on both halves. The basket analog is the RIL- SKU. RIL-GX-B300-2T is not a single OEM part number, it is the standardized spec for a complete 8-GPU HGX B300 system, which a Supermicro SYS-A22GA-NBRT and a Gigabyte G894-AD1-AAX5 both satisfy. The clock analog is the daily blend computed at 17:00 UTC. Where Brent assesses the most competitive deliverable grade, the index computes a 30-day rolling blend of forward prices from active Rillor contracts on that SKU. Same structure. A precisely defined deliverable, fixed at a published moment, producing one number the market can settle against.

The window matters more in compute than it might seem, because forward prices for accelerators move on news, allocation announcements, fab yield commentary, hyperscaler capex guidance, in ways that intraday spot for a mature crude grade does not. A 30-day rolling blend deliberately damps single-day noise while a fixed 17:00 UTC stamp keeps the number reproducible. That is the same engineering tradeoff Platts makes with Market on Close: define the moment tightly, then build a methodology robust enough that the moment is not gameable.

Henry Hub: a physical anchor under a cash-settled complex

If Brent teaches the assessment window, Henry Hub teaches the relationship between physical and financial. Henry Hub is a physical location, a gas interchange in Erath, Louisiana, owned and operated through Sabine Pipe Line LLC. The core CME/NYMEX Henry Hub natural gas futures contract is physically deliverable at that hub. Regional US gas markets do not invent their own prices, they quote as a differential to Henry Hub, so a single physical point anchors a national price structure.

The instructive part is what gets layered on top. Alongside the physically deliverable core contract, CME lists Look-Alike and Penultimate variants that are cash settled, paying the cash value of the index rather than moving any molecules of gas. The physical contract is the anchor. The cash-settled complex floats above it, deriving its legitimacy entirely from the fact that, underneath, real gas changes hands at a real place on a real date.

This is exactly the line Rillor draws, and it is worth being precise about the regulatory grammar. The CFTC defines a forward contract as a cash transaction in which a commercial buyer and seller agree on delivery of a specified quality and quantity at a future date. Cash settlement, by contrast, pays the buyer the cash value of the underlying or an index level instead of delivering the commodity. Rillor contracts are bilateral OTC forwards entered with the intent of physical delivery, which is why they sit in the forward-contract exclusion rather than being exchange-listed futures. Every Rillor contract delivers iron: a 10 percent deposit at execution, the balance at delivery, an independent escrow agent holding funds, a seller performance bond, and NVIDIA channel compliance with the end-customer-of-record captured.

What floats on top is not Rillor's business to operate. Third-party exchanges, funds, and DEXs license the Rillor Compute Index and build cash-settled products, perps and futures, against it. Rillor does not run those venues and never cash-settles its own book. Henry Hub's operator does not become a financial exchange because hundreds of cash-settled contracts reference its delivery point. The same separation holds here. We are the physical anchor and the index author. The derivative complex is downstream, by design. We have written separately on why Rillor settles physically and never cash-settles and on how a DEX would build a cash-settled B300 perp on the index.

LBMA gold: own the number, license the number

Brent and Henry Hub teach mechanics. The LBMA Gold Price teaches ownership, and ownership is the part most people miss when they imagine building a benchmark.

The LBMA owns the intellectual property rights to the LBMA Gold Price. The number is set twice daily, at 10:30 and 15:00 UK time, through an electronic, physically settled auction. Administration is outsourced to ICE Benchmark Administration, which runs it as an FCA-regulated, IOSCO-compliant benchmark. Critically, any party using the price for valuation, pricing, settlement, contract references, or financial products must obtain a usage licence from IBA. The auction is the production process. The license is the business.

That distinction is the entire thesis behind the index being the moat, not the marketplace. The Rillor Compute Index is owned and controlled by Rillor. It is computed from active Rillor contracts, which means the input data is proprietary and the methodology is ours. It is then licensed as a settlement feed and an API to exchanges, funds, and researchers, exactly as the LBMA licenses gold. A competitor can observe that B300 systems trade somewhere around a given level. What a competitor cannot do is replicate a continuously computed, contract-derived forward price for RIL-NVL72-GB300 without the underlying book of executed Rillor forwards that produces it. The auction makes gold. The contracts make the index. In both cases the owner of the production process owns the reference everyone else pays to use.

The shared precondition: standardization

It is tempting to credit benchmarks to clever methodology. The deeper truth is that none of them could exist without standardization first. Brent works because crude grades are specified by gravity and sulphur content. Henry Hub works because pipeline-quality gas meets a defined heat-content and interchangeability spec. Gold works because a Good Delivery bar is 995 fine to a documented standard. Strip out the spec and there is nothing to quote.

Compute crossed this line when the GPU system became a baseboard standard rather than a bespoke build. The NVIDIA HGX B300 ships as a single standardized 8-GPU baseboard specification, which OEMs such as Supermicro, Gigabyte, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo ISG integrate into their own chassis. The accelerator complex, the GPU count, the HBM3e capacity, the NVLink5 topology, is identical across vendors. That is what lets one RIL- SKU be quoted across a dozen OEMs without the buyer caring whose sheet metal arrives. The chassis differs. The instrument does not.

This is why the RIL- SKU catalog is upstream of everything. Before there is a curve, before there is an index, before a fund can hedge, there has to be an OEM-agnostic spec that buyers and sellers quote against. The standard comes first or the benchmark never forms.

Why compute qualifies as a commodity now

A commodity is a good that is fungible across producers, demanded on a recurring basis, and priced as a unit rather than a one-off negotiation. AI systems now satisfy all three.

Fungibility comes from the baseboard standard described above. An NVIDIA DGX B300 is a spec-defined 8-GPU Blackwell Ultra system delivering 144 PFLOPS of FP4 sparse compute with 2.1 TB of total HBM3e, drawing roughly 14 kW in a 10U form factor. Two such nodes from two OEMs are substitutable in a way that two custom-engineered clusters from 2019 were not. Recurring forward demand comes from the buildout cycle, tier-2 clouds, sovereign AI programs, and enterprise training fleets commit to capacity months ahead, which is the entire reason serious buyers need a forward market rather than a waitlist. And a depreciation curve exists because each generation has a known successor cadence, which makes value over time modelable rather than mysterious.

That third property, depreciation as a public, modelable quantity, is what turns compute from an asset into a tradable commodity. Oil does not depreciate in the warehouse. Compute does, and predictably enough to price.

Where compute diverges: the obsolescence delta

Here the analogy stops, and pretending otherwise would build a broken index. A barrel of Brent next year is, to a first approximation, the same barrel as today. A B200 system next year is not the same as a B200 system today, because B300 will have shipped against it in volume. The GB300 NVL72 unifies 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs in a single liquid-cooled rack-scale platform, and its arrival against the GB200 generation is a sharp step, not a gentle drift.

This is the obsolescence delta, and it is structural to compute in a way it simply is not to crude, gas, or gold. An honest index has to reflect it rather than smooth it away. If the methodology blended B200 and B300 forwards into a single SKU-agnostic compute number, it would average across a generational cliff and produce a price that misleads everyone settling against it. Instead the index is computed per SKU, RIL-GX-B200-2T and RIL-GX-B300-2T are distinct instruments with distinct forward curves, so the delta between them is itself visible and tradable. We treat that depreciation as the headline risk it is in depreciation as a tradable risk and walk the curve mechanics in how the obsolescence delta shows up in the forward curve.

The design lesson from commodities still holds, though, even here. A good benchmark surfaces disagreement rather than hiding it. Brent surfaces grade differentials. Henry Hub surfaces regional basis. The Rillor Compute Index surfaces the obsolescence delta, the spread between a generation shipping today and the one displacing it, as a clean, contract-derived signal.

What Rillor borrows, and what it refuses

The compressed version. We borrow the standardized deliverable from Brent, and built the RIL- SKU as the OEM-agnostic spec the whole market quotes. We borrow the published fixing window, and stamp the blend at 17:00 UTC daily. We borrow the physical anchor under a financial superstructure from Henry Hub, and keep our own contracts firmly on the physical-delivery side of the CFTC's forward definition. We borrow the owned-and-licensed reference price from the LBMA, and own the index outright while licensing it as a feed and an API to exchanges, funds, and researchers.

The one thing we refuse to borrow is cash settlement of our own book. Henry Hub's operator does not run the cash-settled contracts that reference it, and the LBMA does not become a derivatives exchange because the world prices product off its gold fix. Rillor is physical-delivery forward only. The cash-settled venues live downstream, build against the licensed index, and depend on the integrity of a physical market they do not touch. That separation is not a limitation. It is the same architecture that made oil, gas, and gold benchmarkable, applied to the first genuinely new commodity in a generation.