Wall Street is turning Nvidia's AI chips into a new futures market: Chart of the Day

AI spending keeps getting bigger. Figuring out how to price it is still surprisingly hard.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) put an exclamation mark on the scale of the boom this week, forecasting roughly 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028 even as supply struggles to keep up.

The company is also moving beyond simply selling chips, helping to finance customers, and participating in rental revenue as Wall Street increasingly likens Nvidia to the central bank of AI .

CEO Jensen Huang put the shift more simply: "Now, compute is revenue."

Wall Street is preparing to put a tradable price on some of that computing power.

CME Group plans to launch futures on Oct. 5 tied to the hourly rental cost of Nvidia's H100 and B200 graphics processors, pending regulatory approval. The contracts would settle against benchmarks from Silicon Data , which tracks what companies pay to rent those chips.

Silicon Data's H100 benchmark is currently around $2.68 per GPU-hour , while its newer B200 benchmark is about $5.66. Both have moved substantially over the past year, and not always together.

Think about hotel rooms. A night at the Ritz and one at a Motel 6 both buy a bed, but not at the same price.