CME Group launches compute futures for trading on October 5

CME Group is bringing Wall Street’s oldest trick to Silicon Valley’s newest problem. The exchange giant plans to launch two compute futures contracts on October 5, 2026, giving AI developers, cloud providers, and institutional investors a way to hedge against the wildly unpredictable cost of renting the GPUs that power modern artificial intelligence. The contracts, developed in partnership with Silicon Data, will track hourly rental rates for Nvidia’s H100 and B200 chips. What the contracts actually look like The two products are the Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Futures and the Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Futures. Each contract represents one month’s rental of a single GPU from the respective Nvidia chip family. They’ll be listed on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the same venue where energy and metals futures have traded for decades. The launch is pending regulatory review. CME Group and Silicon Data first announced their partnership on May 12, 2026. Silicon Data, which is backed by trading firm DRW, provides the underlying rental rate indexes that the futures will track. The H100 contract targets what is currently the workhorse GPU of the AI industry. Nvidia’s H100, part o...