CME to Launch Compute Futures

CME Group and Silicon Data have unveiled plans to launch two compute futures contracts on 5 October, subject to regulatory review.

The firms observe that “explosive demand” has driven sharp swings in compute prices, with volatility exposing a gap in the risk-management toolkit for companies building the AI infrastructure. The new futures are aimed at closing that gap, bringing transparency to the market and allowing companies, including AI developers and hyperscalers, to lock in their costs. They will also provide a window into future AI spending.

They add that the new trading tools will bring much-needed hedging and investment vehicles to businesses looking to manage the cost of compute, the processing power and hardware infrastructure that machines need to train and run AI models.

Both Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Futures and Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Futures will track indexes measuring hourly rental GPU costs published by Silicon Data. Each contract will represent a month’s worth of rent for the Nvidia H100, the chip central to today’s AI ecosystem, and the next-generation Nvidia Blackwell B200, respectively.

“Compute has become the currency of the AI age, and this innovative market will bring transparency to the current and future costs that AI builders and hyperscalers need to hedge as they grow,” says Pete Keavey, global head of energy and environmental products at CME Group. “Just as oil fuelled the 20th century economy and evolved from spot trading into a global derivatives market, our futures contracts will now turn compute into a standardised, tradable commodity that will provide global businesses with a reliable, regulated venue to manage price risk .”

Carmen Li, CEO of Silicon Data, adds, “For years, two companies buying the exact same GPU capacity could pay wildly different prices with no way to know who got the better deal. They will now have a benchmark to check that against. Compute futures give the market something it’s never had: a public, tradable reference price for the resource every AI system runs on. Silicon Data’s benchmarks make that price real; CME makes it tradable. Together, that turns compute from something enterprises negotiate blindly into a market they can actually plan around.”