The most important market of the future could be in LLM tokens — and financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for them.
China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens, according to Reuters. The news comes as major derivatives exchange CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange (the owner of the NYSE) have separately said they’re working on launching futures contracts for renting GPUs.
GPU markets are still maturing, but given the wide range of companies using, selling, and renting GPUs, there’s a robust market for spot prices on GPU rental, typically charged by the hour. According to data from AI Mining Co., which tracks daily GPU rental pricing across 28 marketplaces and cloud providers, median prices for Nvidia H100 GPUs ranged from $1.40 to $4.27 per hour across 13 marketplaces, while average prices for H200 GPUs were between $2.34 and $5 per hour across 10 marketplaces. Over the past seven days, average H100 prices ranged from $2.79 to $3.33.
While mature markets exist for GPUs, there’s less financial infrastructure around tokens themselves — the fundamental building blocks of contemporary AI models. Enterprise plans for major AI companies are commonly denominated in tokens: OpenAI, for example, charges $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens for API access to its latest GPT-5.5 model. Cloud providers are also increasingly offering per-token pricing, as with Amazon’s Bedrock system.
The effort comes amid an unprecedented buildout of AI infrastructure. Cloud service providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players have poured hundreds of billions into building data centers, anticipating continued demand for GPUs and compute. An emerging crop of global neocloud companies is also competing for a share of this demand — some specializing in inference, others competing directly with cloud giants like Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud.
By targeting AI tokens, the Shanghai exchange’s derivative product would be tied to how AI companies price their services, giving businesses, investors, and data center operators a way to hedge against the cost of compute.
Source: Financial Exchanges Are Building Futures Markets for AI Compute Tokens