Commodity brokers gear up to trade AI compute futures as CFTC review continues

Wall Street has futures for oil, corn, cattle and orange juice. Soon it may have them for renting an Nvidia chip by the hour. Commodity brokers are preparing to trade derivatives based on the cost of renting AI computing power. The products would turn GPU time into something traders can hedge, speculate on and price years ahead, assuming US regulators sign off. Who is lining up, and what they would trade The brokers named in the preparations include ADM Investor Services, BGC Group and Nanhua USA LLC. Their plan is to facilitate trading in compute futures once the products clear regulatory review. The contracts themselves are cash-settled. That means nobody takes delivery of a pallet of graphics cards when a contract expires. Instead, money changes hands based on where a price index lands. The underlying price is the hourly rental cost of Nvidia GPUs, primarily the H100 and B200 models. CME Group is working with Silicon Data to bring cash-settled futures that track GPU rental prices. Each of those contracts represents 730 GPU-hours over a month. That number is not random. It works out to one GPU running around the clock for a typical month, which makes the contract roughly equivale...