The Emerging Asset Class of Compute Credits
In the digital economy, compute has surpassed valuable resources such as oil, gold and even data. As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes industries and digital transformation accelerates, demand for processing power has surged to the point where computing capacity itself is now being traded, financed, and securitized as an investable asset.
Today is the age of compute credits — a new financial instrument that is rapidly emerging at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, AI, and capital markets.
What Are Compute Credits?
Compute credits are units of prepaid access to computing resources such as processing power, data storage, and bandwidth. They allow users to consume cloud infrastructure on demand by paying only for the capacity they actually use without owning the physical hardware.
Every major cloud provider already issues its own credits. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all sell credits to enterprises that want predictable pricing, while tech giants often structure their partnerships in terms of cloud credit allocations rather than cash. Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI, for example, was denominated largely in Azure compute credits, which illustrates how cloud capacity has become a form of strategic currency.
According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, “Compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it may be the most precious commodity in the world.”
Why Compute Is Becoming an Asset Class
The economics driving compute are staggering. Global cloud infrastructure spending reached approximately $330 billion in 2024, up nearly $60 billion in a single year, with AI workloads accounting for roughly half of that growth. McKinsey & Company estimates that by 2030, data centers will require $6.7 trillion in new investment to meet compute demand.
This capital requirement has catalyzed a new financial frontier: the monetization and securitization of compute capacity. Firms like Trillium Technologies Inc., through its Archeo Futurus cloud platform, are pioneering the packaging of compute credits into tradable, income-generating securities. Trillium’s structure is backed by one billion Archeo Compute Credits, each representing $1 in equivalent value to mainstream cloud providers and independently validated by The Tolley Group for pricing parity with AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
In essence, compute credits transform access to digital infrastructure into a liquid financial product that is analogous to how carbon credits turned emissions rights into tradable commodities two decades ago.
The Market Opportunity
Several powerful macro trends are converging to make compute credits a viable investment class:
- Artificial Intelligence and Generative Models:
Large language models, generative AI systems, and agentic applications require enormous computational horsepower. Training a frontier model can cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud compute spend. Demand for inference and running models once trained is even greater. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang observed, “The amount of inference compute needed is already 100 times more than training — and that’s just the beginning.” - Digital Transformation and Data Explosion:
Every sector, from healthcare to finance, is digitizing operations and producing exponential volumes of data. Processing and analyzing that data at scale requires reliable compute access, making credits a strategic reserve for enterprises and governments alike. - Supply Constraints:
High-end GPUs remain scarce, and data center buildouts face power, land, and chip supply bottlenecks. This scarcity is driving demand for secondary markets that can reallocate unused compute efficiently and transparently. - Securitization and Financialization:
Just as mortgage-backed securities transformed real estate finance, compute-backed notes are beginning to reshape how capital flows into infrastructure. Structured products like Trillium’s Vienna Stock Exchange–listed notes offer institutional investors a 12% annual coupon and direct exposure to an asset base collateralized by compute credits.
From Utility to Investment Vehicle
Compute credits are evolving into a store of value. Each credit can represent a unit of computational labor, fungible across applications, time, and geography. For example, Archeo Compute Credits can be used to power AI model training, run large-scale simulations, or process medical imaging data.
Trillium’s model goes further by issuing payment-in-kind (PIK) compute credits, generating a 20% annual yield on unused balances. This mechanism preserves collateral value while expanding available compute capacity over time—a digital analog to interest-bearing securities.
By integrating this structure with securitization vehicles in Luxembourg, Trillium bridges the gap between institutional capital markets and the digital infrastructure layer of the AI economy. The credits serve as both a consumable resource and a yield-bearing asset that is functionally similar to tokenized commodities, but with tangible economic utility underpinning their value.
Creating a Marketplace for Compute
At present, the compute market remains fragmented. Organizations with excess cloud commitments have few ways to liquidate them, while those short on capacity must pay steep premiums. Trillium’s planned Compute Credit Marketplace aims to change that by enabling secondary trading, price discovery, and arbitrage of compute credits.
This marketplace would allow cloud users, developers, and investors to buy or sell credits dynamically thereby enhancing liquidity while optimizing capacity allocation. For instance, a healthcare AI startup could purchase discounted credits from an enterprise that over-provisioned compute for its own workloads. In turn, investors could participate in this trading ecosystem through securitized instruments backed by underlying compute credit pools.
The Broader Implications
Treating compute as an asset class has far-reaching implications. It enables capital markets to fund the infrastructure that underpins AI innovation without relying solely on hyperscalers or venture equity. It also introduces a framework for valuing and exchanging digital production capacity, laying the groundwork for a global “compute economy.”
In time, this could lead to standardized compute exchanges, futures contracts, and derivatives similar to energy markets. Compute could even serve as a reserve asset for AI-driven enterprises, much like oil reserves back energy companies today.
As AI becomes the defining technology of the 21st century, compute credits could emerge as its foundational financial layer — a new form of digital capital bridging bits and balance sheets.
The Bottom Line
Just as electricity powered the industrial age, compute powers the intelligence age. Those who control, finance, or efficiently allocate compute capacity will shape the economic landscape of AI.
The rise of compute credits signals that investors no longer need to build data centers to gain exposure to the most vital input of the digital era. Instead, they can own the rights to compute itself — transforming a fundamental technological utility into a tradable, yield-generating asset class.