About The Grid

Twenty-one contributing sources are collected automatically every day at 05:30 AEST: GPU rental pricing, AI provider status pages, token pricing, semiconductor earnings, DRAM spot markets, trade data, power interconnection queues, and social-signal volume (Hacker News today; X and Reddit collection is degraded and disclosed as such in the data-health panel).

Everything is organised into one fixed comprehension spine — seven supply-chain segments, the same order every day: Fabrication · Packaging & Assembly · Memory · Power & Cooling · Networking & Interconnect · Compute Supply · Demand & Deployment. The reader learns the seven once and never re-learns them. Each segment is tagged by what it can honestly say today: [instrumented] (a direct daily series), [proxy] (an adjacent stand-in), or [gap](no live instrument — reported as a documented hole, never faked). Packaging & Assembly is the most binding segment in the chain and currently a [gap]: that honesty is the point. The Grid measures where pressure lands, not where it originates — and says so.

The signal is the supply chain. Upstream structural conditions — HBM allocation, CoWoS and substrate lead times, wafer pricing, sold-out notes, export-control events — are the input. Equity and price moves are confirmation and consequence, never the lead: a move proves an upstream read landed. When a shift traces to a named business — ARM, Micron, SK Hynix, Ajinomoto — naming it is the product working correctly. Read first, name second. The Grid takes no investment positions and makes no price calls on equities.

The GPI is a 0–100 composite score measuring aggregate buyer-side pressure across four weighted contributing factors: GPU Rental Trend (30%), Memory Pressure (25%), Supply Chain Forward (30%), and Provider Incidents (15%). 50 = the 30-day mean; above 50, pressure is tightening.

Each factor is z-score normalised against its own 30-day history, with severity-weighted incident scoring (critical ×4, major ×3, minor ×1, maintenance ×0.5). The full methodology — including the band scale (Abundant / Balanced / Tight / Constrained / Critical) — is publicly documented. Anyone with the same data pipeline can calculate the same GPI. The moat is the pipeline, not the formula.

The daily editorial is an LLM-synthesised reading of that day's data, organised on a four-part spine:

• The Call— the standing binding-constraint judgment: which segment binds, which way it is moving. Weekly and event-driven, carried between issues rather than restated daily.
• The Assessment— the seven segments, continuously refreshed: state, direction, coverage tag, and the buyer's verb for each.
• The Move— the daily hero: what moved most, traced downstream with an explicit lag, and the business it lands on.
• The Score— when a call's window matures, whether it held. Honest and dated; the public record accrues in the open.

Every data claim carries inline source attribution and an observation tag: OBS (directly observed from data), AST (assessed from multiple signals), or EST(estimated with stated uncertainty). The editorial observes; forecasts are tracked separately with falsifiable metrics, timeframes, and confidence scores — each verified against observed data when its horizon matures, the running accuracy record feeding back into the next forecast.

Grid Standards defines the vocabulary The Grid uses — the GPI methodology and band scale, Grid Assessed Prices (GAP) by GPU class, the OCPI settlement benchmark (attributed to Ornn), the seven-segment supply-chain taxonomy, observation classifications, and temporal-horizon formats. Published under CC BY 4.0. Free, open, citable.

The market problem in one line: $2 trillion in cumulative AI compute expenditure by 2028, with no structured daily buyer-side intelligence about the market being purchased in.

The Grid is built by Jason Harvey. Manufacturing and supply chain operations background (COO, ModularWalls). The intuition behind The Grid comes from industrial commodity markets — LME warehouse warrants, stockyard yarding numbers, Baltic Dry Index — applied to AI compute.

Based in Sydney, Australia. The daily briefing publishes at 05:30 AEST — first read of the Asia-Pacific trading day.