Compute behaves less like corn or gold and more like electricity — temporal, non-fungible, priced by the hour. A thread argued that before compute futures could exist, someone had to build a credible price index. This is a field study of that market as it actually stands in mid-2026: three index providers racing to become the benchmark, live GPU-rental prices, a working spot marketplace, and a running collection of the questions that came up along the way.
Live Silicon Data readings · captured 2026-07-05
A cash-settled future needs one number everyone trusts at expiry. Whoever owns that number owns the market — the way S&P owns "the S&P 500" and licenses it to every exchange and ETF. Three players are racing to be that index; the two furthest along each pair with a venue to settle contracts — Silicon Data with CME, Ornn with ICE (plus Architect and Kalshi). Ornn's OCPI already prints on the Bloomberg Terminal.
No trusted, manipulation-resistant reference price → no settlement, easy manipulation, useless hedges. Liquidity can't form until the index exists and is believed. That's why all three obsess over transaction-based methodology — it's the exact lesson of LIBOR → SOFR: move off self-reported surveys onto real prints, or the whole edifice is gameable.
The index deliberately abstracts away region, provider and rental term to produce one representative number per chip — the "generic basket." A specific machine (a region, an interconnect, a 3-month reserve) trades at index ± basis. Note the two-tier split: hyperscaler H100 sits near $7 (largely on-demand list price from AWS/GCP/Azure), while neocloud H100 sits near $2.70 (competitive spot across CoreWeave, Lambda, RunPod, Vast.ai…). That ~2.7× gap is a basis — and the reason neoclouds exist.
Price is a function of two time axes — calendar date and contract tenor. The forward curve fixes "today" and sweeps tenor (one row). To see a single contract's history you fix the tenor and sweep the calendar (one column). Silicon Data's trial shows only today's row; the historical dates sit behind the paid tier.
The full year, straight from the feed. Pulled from Silicon Data's own live archive — one year of daily prints for every index (2025-07 → 2026-07). Two things the headline number hides: H100 neocloud actually rose ~28% off a $1.96 trough, and the newest silicon (B200) is by far the most volatile.
| Index | Current | 1Y Low | 1Y High | 1Y Δ | Volatility |
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If the index is the abstraction, Compute Exchange (same CEO as Silicon Data, co-founded by DRW's Don Wilson — the index layer and the trading venue under one roof) is the ground truth: an auction marketplace where every listing is a fully-specified SKU — model × form-factor × memory × interconnect × NIC × DPU. It's the best picture of what "a unit of compute" really means. Two things jump out: the sheer generational spread (Ampere → Rubin), and that next-gen silicon is already sold as a forward — Rubin chips that don't exist yet are listed "Expected Jul 2026 · Submit Interest." That is the thread's "capacity forward" in the wild.
The catalog as a SKU taxonomy. A sample of the pools — note the gold card: a capacity forward on hardware that hasn't shipped. Browse Compute Exchange ↗
"Reservations / capacity forwards are almost always bilateral OTC trades on particular SKUs." Here it is on-screen: Vera Rubin NVL — 288GB HBM, 22 TB/s, 35 PFLOPS FP4, NVLink 6 — offered for reservation months before the silicon exists. Whether these forwards ever standardize enough to hedge on an exchange is the open question of the whole space.
The thread imagined dealers hedging specific SKUs against a "generalized basket exchange (e.g. an H200 basket)." Read literally, the basket is per-chip — and that already exists (SDH100RT, OCPI-H100). In that sense the vision has shipped: CME↔Silicon Data and ICE↔Ornn are building futures on exactly those per-chip baskets. But the tempting bigger idea — a single, cross-chip general compute price — runs into three walls:
A single "general compute index" is likely to emerge as a macro barometer (a CPI-for-AI-compute) rather than the core hedging benchmark. And the truly universal unit may not live at the GPU layer at all — it may be $/token. Ornn's Token Price Index and Silicon Data's LLM Token Index already price the useful output directly, abstracting the hardware away entirely. Tokens are more fungible than GPU-hours — so if one number ever comes to mean "the price of compute," it might be measured in tokens, not hours.
This project was built by asking, in order, whatever didn't make sense. Grouped by theme, here's the collection — the compute- and market-structure-specific ones worth keeping.
Field notes, not investment advice. Prices are point-in-time readings from third-party portals (Silicon Data, Compute Exchange) captured 2026-07-05 and move constantly; forward-curve and time-series charts trace on-screen shapes and are illustrative. Company details from public reporting. Direction-2 (the index layer) is the focus here; the "will the market form" and dealer/basis strands remain open.