The currency of the AI age

Emily Peck

Wed, August 12, 2026 astatine 6:10 AM CDT 3 min read

There's an effort underway to make a futures marketplace for AI compute — the processing capableness needed to bid and tally AI models — akin to however investors bargain and merchantability commodities similar lipid oregon grain.

Why it matters: A compute futures marketplace would bring much transparency, caller ways to negociate volatility and adjacent much concern into what's rapidly becoming a captious portion of the economy.

The large picture: Futures markets let companies to hedge against swings successful prices. If you're an airline, you tin bargain lipid futures to negociate costs. A husbandman mightiness bargain soybean futures to hedge against however good his harvest does that year.

• Historically, creating a much transparent marketplace for a commodity has unlocked much investments. Plenty of traders and investors successful lipid and soybeans ne'er ain the underlying asset.

The latest: The speech relation CME Group said Tuesday that it plans to motorboat 2 compute futures contracts connected Oct. 5, "pending regulatory review." The radical is moving with Silicon Data, a institution that publishes indexes tracking compute pricing.

• Each futures declaration would correspond a month's worthy of rent for the Nvidia H100 oregon its newer Nvidia Blackwell B200, per the release.

• The thought is to crook compute into a "standardized, tradable commodity," Pete Keavey, planetary caput of vigor and biology products astatine CME Group, said successful the release.

State of play: Another company, New York-based OneChronos, is besides moving connected a compute futures marketplace and is awaiting support from national regulators.

• The institution expects it to beryllium operational this year, CEO Kelly Littlepage tells Axios.

Reality check: The large occupation with treating AI compute similar a commodity is that it simply is not similar a commodity, Littlepage says. A barroom of golden is fundamentally similar immoderate different barroom of gold, but compute is different.

• "Just from an Econ 101 stance, it really fails each measurement of being a commodity since it's not fungible. It's not storable. It's not transportable. There's really thing astir it that you would see a commodity."

Zoom in: The startup's futures marketplace is utilizing what's known arsenic "combinatorial" auctions to woody with the issue. And it's moving with Paul Milgrom, an economist who developed a akin strategy to auction wireless spectrum — and won a Nobel Prize for his work.

Between the lines: The large players successful the AI marketplace person been talking astir compute arsenic an "investable plus class" — literally the rubric of the Nvidia CEO's station Monday nighttime astir the $500 cardinal financing woody he's ginned up with six large fiscal firms.