Compute is the raw material of the coming decade, yet it trades without a public reference, a settlement layer, or an audit trail. northdex establishes one that no single party owns. This document describes exactly how the index is calculated — including, honestly, what it does and does not yet measure.
Each northdex index expresses the prevailing market price to rent one GPU of a given class for one hour, in USD, across a defined European scope. The family currently covers NDX-H100, NDX-H200 and NDX-B200 by hardware, and NDX-EU as a region-weighted composite.
The index is a reference, not a quote: it is designed to be a number two counterparties can both accept, not a price at which northdex itself transacts.
Today the index is computed from observable market prices published by public GPU marketplaces. These are indicative — advertised availability, not confirmed settlements — and we label them as such rather than overstate them.
The index moves to a transaction basis as European operators contribute the prices of deals they have actually concluded, under the protections on our data-partner terms. Contributed prices are anonymised and never attributable to a single operator.
The reference for each scope is the median of observed prices, weighted by region and venue. A median cannot be moved by a single outlying quote, which makes the index resistant to manipulation by any one participant.
Where an index period spans time, it is settled as a time-averaged value over the period — the same approach used by established energy benchmarks — so no single moment determines the reference.
No figure derived from contributed data is ever published unless it blends at least three independent contributors for the relevant GPU type and region. Below that threshold, an individual operator's pricing could in principle be inferred, so nothing is shown.
We collect only commercial, non-personal fields (GPU, price, currency, region, month, quantity) — never a customer identity — so the index carries no personal data by design.
Every hourly snapshot is bound to the previous one with SHA-256, forming a tamper-evident ledger of the full pricing history. Any third party can recompute the published index from the underlying feed and verify it against the chain.
This is what makes northdex auditable rather than merely asserted: the number can be checked, not just trusted.
If a data error is identified, the affected snapshot is corrected and the change is recorded in a public revision log. Historical published values are never altered without a corresponding, timestamped entry.
northdex is built toward the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks — the global standard for benchmark design, methodology transparency, and governance — with an oversight function described on the governance page. Data is hosted in the EU and handled under GDPR.