CME Group and Silicon Data are launching GPU rental futures contracts on October 5, 2026, creating the first standardize

CME Group, the world's leading derivatives marketplace, and Silicon Data, an industry leader in GPU market intelligence and benchmarking backed by trading firm DRW, announced plans to launch two Compute futures contracts on October 5, 2026, pending regulatory review.

These contracts will provide hedging and investment vehicles for businesses managing compute costs, the processing power and hardware infrastructure needed to train and run AI models. The 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, central to today's AI ecosystem, and the next-generation Nvidia Blackwell B200, respectively.

Pete Keavey, Global Head of Energy and Environmental Products at CME Group, said that compute has become the currency of the AI age and the market will bring transparency to the costs that AI builders and hyperscalers need to hedge as they grow. He compared the development to how oil fueled the twentieth century economy and evolved from spot trading into a global derivatives market, noting that the futures contracts will turn compute into a standardized, tradable commodity providing businesses with a reliable, regulated venue to manage price risk.

Carmen Li, Chief Executive Officer of Silicon Data, stated that for years two companies buying the 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 against. She emphasized that compute futures give the market a public, tradable reference price for the resource every AI system runs on, turning compute from something enterprises negotiate blindly into a market they can actually plan around.

Explosive demand has driven sharp swings in compute prices, exposing a gap in the risk management toolkit for companies building AI infrastructure. The CME Group and Silicon Data Compute futures close that gap, bringing transparency to the market and allowing companies to lock in their costs while providing a window into future AI spending. The new contracts will be listed and subject to the rules of NYMEX.