Framework
Intelligence Yield
A working framework for connecting physical AI capacity to the customer value it produces and the capital employed to produce it.
· 3 minute read
If megawatts are an incomplete measure, something has to replace them. Outpace's working answer is Intelligence Yield.
It is important to be clear about what this is. Intelligence Yield is a working economic framework developed by Outpace for its own underwriting and operating discipline. It is not an audited industry standard, and it has not yet been validated against operating data from live projects.
The idea
Intelligence Yield asks what a project earns from contracted AI workloads, after adjusting for risk, relative to the total capital employed to produce it. It forces a connection between three things that are often discussed separately: the physical asset, the customer contract and the capital structure.
What it looks at
- Physical efficiency: useful compute delivered per energised megawatt.
- Utilisation: billable workload hours against available hours.
- Commercial yield: revenue and gross profit per energised megawatt.
- Capital yield: gross profit per dollar of total capital employed.
- Assurance premium: incremental margin from sovereignty, privacy, provenance or dedicated capacity.
- Risk adjustment: customer credit, contract term, concentration, refresh and financing risk.
Why not just count tokens?
Tokens are a useful analytical and pricing unit, and managed inference providers already sell on a per-token basis. But not all tokens have equal value. Capacity produced for a regulated bank under sovereign controls is not economically equivalent to the same volume of commodity batch inference.
The framework is meant to capture that difference, and to make it visible to the people allocating capital.
This article sets out the views of Outpace. It is general information, not financial product advice. See Important information.