Silicon Data, the startup that provides market intelligence for artificial intelligence compute infrastructure, will provide the price indexes for a new futures market that will allow investors to hedge their bets on the semiconductor industry.

CME Group’s new “compute futures market” will give investors the opportunity to bet on the price of renting cloud-based computing power for AI workloads, the companies explained. Investors will be able to take out contracts and lock in a price for compute capacity based on Silicon Data’s benchmark for graphics processing units. It provides a way for them to hedge against the rising costs of renting graphics processing units, at a time when demand for the chips is going through the roof.

“GPU markets have historically lacked standardized reference pricing,” said Silicon Data Chief Executive Carmen Li. “The launch of compute futures is an important step toward giving AI builders, cloud providers and investors more reliable tools for valuation, hedging and long-term planning.”

Futures markets are usually associated with commodities such as oil and other petroleum products, precious metals and basic foodstuffs, but they’ve also become common for assembled components in fast-growing industries, where prices and demand change rapidly.

Silicon Data is a natural partner for CME Group in this endeavor. Last month it launched a new service called the GPU Forward Curve, which offers the first standardized look at the anticipated costs of GPU capacity both now and in the future. Its products also include a standardized GPU price index and a dynamic random-access price index.

When it launched the GPU Forward Curve last month, Silicon Data said its intention was to transform AI compute into a financialized commodity, and it has wasted little time in making that vision a reality. The launch of the new index is especially timely because few industry observers, or investors for that matter, see demand for GPU rentals slowing down anytime soon.

Morgan Stanley analyst Shawn Kim said in a note to clients this week that demand for GPUs and also central processing units is going to explode in future as more autonomous AI agents come online. “The AI system in the future will look like a distributed system consisting of GPU racks for dense model compute … [and] agentic CPU racks for orchestration, processing data and tool execution,” he wrote.

The price of memory chips has soared this year as AI infrastructure providers continue to gobble up the world’s supply of GPUs and now, increasingly, CPUs as well. Hyperscale data center operators like Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. have all announced plans to increase their capital expenditures this year, leading to shortages of memory chips that are driving prices higher.

Memory chipmakers are benefiting enormously from this demand, with their stocks being among the biggest gainers in the year to date.

Image: Silicon Data