CME Group is teaming up with Silicon Data to launch two futures contracts tied to the price of AI computing power on Oct. 5, pending regulatory approval. The contracts track the rental cost of Nvidia's H100 and Blackwell B200 GPUs, giving companies and investors a new way to trade and hedge exposure to AI infrastructure costs.
CME Group is set to launch the first futures contracts tied to the cost of running AI chips, turning computing power into a new tradable asset class. The exchange is partnering with Silicon Data to introduce two compute futures contracts on Oct. 5, pending regulatory approval, giving companies and investors a way to trade and hedge the price of AI computing capacity much as they do oil, electricity and other commodities.
Contracts track Nvidia GPU rental costs
The contracts will let buyers and sellers trade against the rental cost of Nvidia's H100 and newer Blackwell B200 graphics processing units, based on Silicon Data indexes that track hourly GPU rental prices. Each contract represents a month's rent for the Nvidia H100.
Carmen Li, CEO of Silicon Data, said the market has lacked a common benchmark for GPU pricing. According to CNBC: "a public, tradable reference price for the resource every AI system runs on" is what compute futures now give the market.
New layer on top of the AI infrastructure buildout
The launch comes as Wall Street finds new ways to finance and gain exposure to the AI infrastructure buildout. Nvidia is working with some of the world's largest asset managers on an effort that could channel as much as $500 billion into AI infrastructure.
Compute futures add another layer to that emerging financial ecosystem. Rather than investing directly in data centers, chips or the companies building them, investors could gain exposure to the price of the underlying computing capacity itself, while AI developers and data-center operators could use the contracts to hedge their costs or revenues.
Source: CNBC
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
