CME Group Plans World’s First AI Compute Futures Market

AI model training and inference depend heavily on GPUs, but rental rates vary widely across cloud platforms, regions and contracts, making it difficult for companies to forecast long-term costs. Silicon Data launched its H100 Rental Index on May 20, 2025, aggregating 3.5 million global quotes to establish a daily rental-rate benchmark for NVIDIA H100 GPUs and lay the groundwork for the financialization of computing power.

CME Group and Silicon Data announced on May 12, 2026, that they planned to launch the world’s first compute futures market later in 2026, subject to regulatory review. The contracts will be priced against Silicon Data’s daily on-demand GPU rental index and track hourly H100 rental rates, allowing AI companies, cloud providers and financial institutions to manage price volatility in the multitrillion-dollar compute market. An exact launch date and contract specifications have yet to be disclosed.