CME Group and Silicon Data to Roll Out Compute Futures This October | LeapRate
Derivatives marketplace CME Group and Silicon Data, a GPU market intelligence firm backed by trading firm DRW, have announced plans to launch two new futures contracts tied to the cost of AI computing power. The contracts, set to debut October 5, 2026, are still pending regulatory review.
The new products, called Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Futures and Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Futures, will track indexes that measure hourly GPU rental costs. Each contract represents a month’s worth of rental costs for either the Nvidia H100 chip, widely used in today’s AI systems, or the newer Nvidia Blackwell B200 chip.
The goal is to give companies a way to manage the rising and often unpredictable cost of “compute,” the hardware and processing power needed to train and run artificial intelligence models. As demand for AI infrastructure has surged, prices for GPU access have swung sharply, leaving many businesses without a reliable way to plan for or hedge those costs.
Pete Keavey, Global Head of Energy and Environmental Products at CME Group, compared the shift to how oil evolved from simple spot trading into a global derivatives market. He said compute is becoming “the currency of the AI age” and that these new contracts aim to make its pricing more transparent and standardized.
Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li said the futures will finally give companies a public benchmark for GPU pricing, something that has been missing until now. She noted that businesses have often paid vastly different prices for the same computing capacity with no way to compare deals.
The new contracts will trade under NYMEX rules once approved.
