Wall Street giants race for GPU computing power futures, crypto market battle has already begun

Author: Jae, PANews Computing power has become the "new oil of the 21st century" that supports the global AI operation. The AI-driven computing power arms race is crossing the physical boundaries of information technology and piercing deep into the veins of modern financial infrastructure. Larry Fink, head of the global asset management giant BlackRock, once pointed out that against the backdrop of scarce resources in the AI ecosystem, futures markets linked to computing power might emerge. This prophecy was concretely verified in May. Within just one week, two major leaders in the traditional financial market, CME Group and the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), announced their layouts in the GPU computing power futures market one after another. Computing power is transforming from an intangible technical resource into a standardized financial asset that can be speculated, traded, and hedged. The fierce competition among Wall Street giants for the pricing power of this new type of macro commodity also marks the official start of the first year of the financialization of computing power assets. ### GPU Futures Become a New Battlefield on Wall Street: ICE Goes All-in, CME Takes the Lead In this landing battle for the financialization of computing power assets, the two Wall Street giants have chosen different entry paths. On May 19, ICE joined forces with data provider Ornn to enter the market aggressively, planning to launch a series of GPU computing power futures contracts based on the Ornn Computing Power Price Index (OCPI). The OCPI introduced by ICE is the world's first computing power index constructed based on real transaction records. Ornn distributes this index in real-time to Bloomberg terminals through its subsidiary Ornn Data to ensure the transparency of pricing data, thereby avoiding the problem of "distorted listed prices." Kush Bavaria, co-founder and CEO of Ornn, believes that computing power has grown into a trillion-dollar market, and ICE's futures listing will provide a risk transfer layer for institutional buyers and computing power operators. ICE's computing power futures contracts not only cover mainstream enterprise-grade high-end GPUs such as H100, H200, and B200, but also include high-end consumer-grade graphics cards such as the RTX 5090, providing refined hedging options for computing power needs in different scenarios. This means that ICE is attempting to seize global computing power pricing power from cloud to edge, and from training to inference. To further consolidate the industrial foundation of the index, Ornn also brought in Hyperbolic Labs, one of the world's largest GPU marketplaces, as an ally. Its co-founder and CEO, Jasper Zhang, pointed out that the current GPU market is increasingly resembling the global commodity market. ICE's layout precisely hits the risk management pain points of Neoclouds and AI labs. Rather than saying ICE is actively entering the computing power futures market, it is more accurate to say it is in hot pursuit. In fact, CME had already taken the lead a week earlier. On May 12, CME announced that it would partner with Silicon Data, a GPU market intelligence and benchmark data provider backed by trading giant DRW, to launch the world's first computing power futures contract. As a benchmark for the global derivatives market, CME's entry means that computing power has been officially included in the "macro commodity" sequence recognized by Wall Street. Unlike ICE's broad approach, CME's computing power futures are anchored to the "H100 Rental Index" compiled by Silicon Data. By tracking daily standardized real-time on-demand rental rates across mainstream cloud service providers and new GPU cloud platforms, it establishes a unified pricing benchmark for the highly fragmented and opaque spot market. To avoid depreciation and transportation losses during the physical hardware delivery process, CME's GPU futures contracts will adopt a cash settlement model. The underlying asset is not the physical chip, but the expectation of future H100 rental prices. For large-scale cloud service providers, this provides a necessary hedging tool. When cloud service providers invest billions of dollars to purchase H100s, they only need to establish short positions in the CME computing power futures market to lock in the minimum Return on Investment (ROI) of the servers in advance, thereby resisting the asset impairment risk caused by the collapse of computing power prices. This logic is very similar to the logic of turning crude oil, natural gas, and electricity into commodities back in the day. ### Computing Power Futures Ignite the Battle for Pricing Power; Financialization Brings Both Opportunities and Tests Since the wave of large models swept the globe, computing power has jumped from an "IT resource" to a "strategic material" scrambled for by the "AI Big Three" (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and Silicon Valley giants like Meta. In short, whoever hoards more GPUs holds the ticket to the AI era. But the problem follows: the computing power market