Trading AI compute like oil (opens the source in a new tab)
- CME Group plans futures on rental rates for Nvidia’s H100 and B200 chips, out to 36 months.
- H100 rents hit $8 an hour in early 2024, then fell below $2 in late 2025.
- Yet most new futures never draw lasting volume, writes Marc Rubinstein.
- $2.3tn
- 2030 market est.
- $5.86
- B200 per GPU-hour
- $2.77
- H100 per GPU-hour
Why it matters A traded price for compute would show whether the AI boom is paying off.
Other side A GPU Graphics processing unit: the chip, mostly from Nvidia, that trains and runs AI models.-hour isn’t standard: chips age fast and rival indexes disagree. Can a market run by a few giants ever be deep?