"The Currency of the Future": The U.S. Plans to Launch the First AI Computing Power Futures

CME Group, the world’s largest futures exchange operator, in partnership with Silicon Data, a U.S. startup specializing in data on the AI computing power market, plans to launch two computing power futures contracts on October 5. These contracts will allow companies and investors to trade contracts linked to the cost of AI computing resources and hedge related risks in much the same way as they do with oil and other commodities, CNBC explains.

“For many years, two companies purchasing the same amount of GPU computing power could pay different prices without being able to tell which one had secured a better deal. Now they will have a price benchmark,” said Silicon Data CEO Carmen Lee, whose remarks are quoted in the press release. “Computing power futures will give the market something it has never had before: a public benchmark on which the operation of any artificial intelligence system depends.”

The new instruments will allow investors to trade futures contracts linked to the rental prices of Nvidia H100 GPUs and the newer Blackwell B200 GPUs. They will be based on Silicon Data indices, which track hourly GPU rental rates. Each contract will be calculated based on the one-month rental cost of the Nvidia H100.

CME Group and Silicon Data have yet to receive regulatory approval to launch trading, according to CNBC.

The creation of computing power futures is being discussed amid Wall Street’s efforts to find new ways to finance the large-scale construction of AI infrastructure and gain access to this market, according to CNBC. Nvidia, in partnership with the world’s largest asset managers, is working on an initiative that could channel up to $500 billion into the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Computing power futures could become another element of the financial ecosystem forming around AI, the network believes. Instead of investing directly in data centers, chips, or the companies that produce them, investors will be able to bet directly on changes in the value of computing power. At the same time, AI developers and data center operators will be able to use such contracts to hedge against risks related to fluctuations in costs or revenue, CNBC reports.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a conference call following the company’s first public quarterly earnings report on August 4 that demand for AI is growing by 200% per year, so he believes prices for computing power will only rise through 2030.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke as early as 2024 about the possibility that computing power could become an independent economic resource. In an interview with podcaster and AI researcher Lex Friedman, he called computing power “the currency of the future” and suggested that it could become “perhaps the most valuable commodity in the world.” According to Altman, the demand for computing power is fundamentally different from the demand for, say, smartphones: the cheaper computing power becomes, the more ways there are to use it. Therefore, in his view, the world will require such a vast amount of computing power that it is difficult to even estimate today.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor