Just like gold and oil, we will soon be able to trade futures contracts for AI tokens

The most important market in the future could be 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, Reuters reports Reports. This news comes with a major derivatives exchange cm group and Exchange between continents (owner of the New York Stock Exchange) Separately they are working on launching GPU rental futures.

GPU markets are still maturing, but given the wide range of companies using, selling, and leasing GPUs, there is a strong market for spot rates on GPU rentals, which are typically charged by the hour. According to data from AII Mining Companywhich tracks daily GPU rental prices across 28 markets and cloud providers, average prices for Nvidia H100 GPUs ranged from $1.40 to $4.27 per hour across 13 markets, while average prices for H200 GPUs ranged from $2.34 to $5 per hour across 10 markets. Over the past seven days, average H100 prices have ranged from $2.79 to $3.33.

But while there are mature markets for GPUs, there is less infrastructure around the tokens themselves — the building blocks of contemporary AI models. Enterprise plans for major AI companies are usually capped at tokens: for example, OpenAI charges $5 per million input tokens, and $30 per million output tokens if you want to use the latest model GPT-5.5 API. Even cloud providers are increasingly offering the opportunity to charge per token, as in Amazon’s Bedrock System.

This effort comes amid unprecedented construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Cloud providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players alike have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers, anticipating that demand for graphics processing units and compute will continue to rise. A global emerging crop Newcloud companies They are also competing for a piece of this demand. Some of these new entrants specialize and focus on inference, while others compete with cloud giants like Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud to offer their services to AI companies.

By targeting AI tokens, the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s derivative product will be linked to how AI companies price their services, giving companies, investors and data center operators a way to hedge against the cost of computing.