Paweł Czech and Cole Crawford on theCUBE at the NYSE
Aired on theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Factories · Watch on YouTube
On theCUBE + NYSE Wired's AI Factories programme, recorded in theCUBE's studio at the New York Stock Exchange, Starfield CEO Paweł Czech and Cole Crawford, President and Chairman, joined host Gemma Allen to talk about why AI compute should be priced by a market.
Paweł's point: most buyers don't need hyperscale capacity. They need the right capacity, close to them, at a fair price. Today, he argued, buyers keep paying a premium because nobody knows what capacity is actually worth.
What this video covers
Gemma Allen opens from theCUBE's studio at the New York Stock Exchange with a question: what if compute itself is becoming a commodity? Oil became a global market once people learned to measure, price and trade it. She asks what the same idea would mean for compute, and talks it through with Paweł and Cole.
Cole talks about open source and why transparency matters in a market. Gemma then asks how compute in different places can be compared at all, since the same chip in two data centers is not the same thing.
Paweł's part is about buyers. Different uses call for different compute. Some need capacity at the edge, some need a particular source of power. That is why there is no single thing to price. He says buyers keep reaching for the biggest option and keep paying a premium, because nobody knows what their capacity is actually worth. That is the sun and the microwave in the quote below. He wants a tool that opens AI to more than the few buyers who can make very large purchases. The average company or builder is not making those deals.
Later he says what useful capacity means. It has to arrive at a latency you can accept, in a jurisdiction that matters to you. The discussion adds that it has to cost what makes sense for the business. His goal is to supply that capacity at a fair market value set by an actual market.
The short version for anyone who will not watch: capacity has no agreed price today, buyers pay a premium for it, and Paweł thinks a market is the way to fix that.
“You don't have to power up the sun to cook something in the microwave.”
Key moments
- 0:24 Gemma Allen asks whether compute is becoming a commodity
- 3:50 Why compute in different places is not interchangeable
- 9:31 Different uses call for different kinds of compute
- 10:17 You do not need the sun to cook in a microwave, and why buyers pay a premium
- 10:41 Access to AI for more than a few big buyers
- 16:51 What useful capacity means: latency, jurisdiction and cost
- 17:37 The goal: capacity at a fair price set by an actual market
Quotes
“You don't have to power up the sun to cook something in the microwave.”