by Mike Wheatley
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.
