CME Group and Silicon Data announced on Monday that they will launch the first regulated futures contracts tied to the rental price of artificial intelligence computing power, with trading set to begin on October 5 pending regulatory approval.
The two contracts , the Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Future and the Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Future , will track hourly rental rates for Nvidia’s H100 and next-generation Blackwell B200 graphics processing units, allowing companies and investors to hedge or speculate on the cost of the infrastructure that underpins modern AI systems.
News Summary
- CME Group and Silicon Data will launch two compute futures contracts on October 5, 2026, pending regulatory review.
- The contracts will track Silicon Data’s hourly GPU rental indexes for Nvidia’s H100 and Blackwell B200 chips.
- Each contract represents one month’s rent for an Nvidia H100, settled financially against the benchmark index.
- The products will be listed on NYMEX and cleared through CME Clearing.
- Silicon Data, backed by trading firm DRW, publishes what it describes as the first daily GPU benchmarks for on-demand rental rates.
How the Contracts Work
The futures will be cash-settled against Silicon Data’s indexes, which aggregate hourly rental prices for GPU capacity across cloud providers and data center operators. Rather than delivering physical chips, the contracts will settle financially based on the average index price over the contract month.
Each contract will represent one month of rent for a single Nvidia H100 GPU, priced in U.S. dollars. The B200 contract will use a similar structure tied to the newer Blackwell architecture. The products are designed for AI developers, cloud-service providers, and institutional investors who need to manage exposure to compute price volatility without taking physical delivery of hardware.
A Fragmented Market
Silicon Data Chief Executive Officer Carmen Li said the launch addresses a pricing opacity problem that has plagued the compute market. “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,” Li said in a statement provided to CNBC. “They will now have a benchmark to check that against.”
Li, a former Bloomberg and DRW employee, founded Silicon Data in April 2024 to bring financial-market infrastructure to GPU pricing. The company has since published daily rental indexes for the A100, H100, and B200, along with forward curves and hyperscaler benchmarks. DRW, the Chicago-based trading firm founded by Don Wilson, provided seed backing.
Pete Keavey, global head of energy and environmental products at CME Group, compared compute to oil in a statement. “Just as oil fueled the 20th century economy and evolved from spot trading into a global derivatives market, our futures contracts will now turn compute into a standardized, tradable commodity that will provide global businesses with a reliable, regulated venue to manage price risk,” he said.
The Broader Infrastructure Push
The launch arrives as Wall Street builds new financial instruments around the AI infrastructure boom. Nvidia is working with several of the world’s largest asset managers on an effort that could channel as much as $500 billion into AI data centers and related infrastructure, according to prior reporting.
Compute futures add a derivatives layer to that ecosystem. Instead of investing directly in data centers, chipmakers, or cloud providers, investors can now gain exposure to the underlying price of computing capacity itself. For AI labs and hyperscalers, the contracts offer a hedging mechanism against the sharp price swings that have characterized the GPU rental market.
CME Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy said in a May announcement that “compute is the new oil of the 21st century” and that “every AI model trained, every transaction cleared, and every byte of data processed runs on compute, which is becoming a fast-emerging asset class in its own right.”
The contracts remain subject to regulatory review. CME Group has not specified which regulator is conducting the review, though NYMEX operates under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.