On 5 October, compute gets a price you can trade.
CME Group and Silicon Data list two contracts on NYMEX: Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Futures and Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Futures, each representing a month of GPU rental, pending regulatory review. This page explains what that is. It is not affiliated with either firm, and nothing here is trading advice.
What an index future on rental actually is
You are not taking delivery of a GPU. These are cash-settled contracts: at expiry the contract is worth whatever the underlying index says an hour of that chip cost over the month, and the difference is paid in money. Nobody racks a server.
That matters because it gives two groups something they have never had. Someone with real GPU exposure — a cloud with idle capacity, a lab with a training run booked for March, anyone whose budget lives or dies on rental prices — can hedge. And anyone with an opinion about where compute prices go can express it without buying hardware.
What settles them
Silicon Data's rental index. It is a proprietary, licensed series: the methodology is theirs, the data is theirs, and it is the number that decides who pays whom. That is completely normal — nearly every commodity contract settles against a private benchmark.
It also means the number that moves real money is one most people will never be able to recompute for themselves.
Licensed. Settles contracts. Methodology proprietary. You take it on trust, which is the ordinary arrangement in commodities and works fine.
Open. Settles nothing. Median of listed prices across every provider we poll, recomputable line by line from a sealed, hashed daily tape.
Two honest numbers about the same chip can differ
Ours is a median of what compute is quoted at. Theirs is where it clears. Those are different questions and they will not give the same answer — a listed price is an ask, and asks are not fills.
The distance between them has a name. It is the basis, and from listing day we publish it daily: our open number and the gap, with a link out to CME for their print. As far as we can tell nobody else is publishing that, for a simple reason — you cannot subtract from an index that isn't public.
the basis tracker →What we publish, and what we don't
- We publish our median and the gap. Both are ours, both are recomputable from the tape.
- We do not mirror their feed. One settlement a day, keyed by hand, linked back to CME for the print. Their settlement is not a column in our CSV.
- We will not pretend that is a wall. Given our number and the gap, theirs is arithmetic. What it avoids is operating a machine-readable mirror of somebody else's licensed series, which is the thing that would actually matter.
Where our number comes from
Every thirty minutes we take each provider's median listed price for a chip, then the median across providers — one provider listing four hundred cards cannot outvote a provider listing one. The day is the median of its bins, UTC to UTC. Form factors are never blended: H100 SXM, PCIe and NVL are separate series, because they are separate products at separate prices.
the per-chip prices · raw JSON · sealed days · check the seals yourself