Speaking of financialization....*
From CNBC, August 11:
- CME Group is partnering with Silicon Data to introduce two compute futures contracts on Oct. 5, pending regulatory approval.
- The new asset class will give companies and investors an avenue to trade and hedge the price of AI computing capacity, much as they do oil, electricity and other commodities.
Computing power is emerging as a new tradable asset class, with CME Group set to launch the first futures contracts tied to the cost of running the chips that power artificial intelligence.
The exchange is partnering with Silicon Data to introduce two compute futures contracts on Oct. 5, pending regulatory approval, giving companies and investors a way to trade and hedge the price of AI computing capacity much as they do oil, electricity and other commodities.
“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. They will now have a benchmark to check that against,” Carmen Li, CEO of Silicon Data, said in a statement. “Compute futures give the market something it’s never had: a public, tradable reference price for the resource every AI system runs on.”
The contracts will allow buyers and sellers to trade against the rental cost of Nvidia’s H100 and newer Blackwell B200 graphics processing units and will be based on Silicon Data indexes that track hourly GPU rental prices. Each contract will represent a month’s rent for the Nvidia H100....
