Why the Future of AI May Run on a Commodity Contract

U.S. policy and derivatives trading expertise are converging to financialize GPU compute

I recently wrote about GPU futures, and a reader DM’d me a bunch of questions. This post addresses those questions. What follows explains how GPU futures might arrive and why various market participants would be interested in GPU futures.¹

Editor’s note (added Aug 15th 2025): Since originally publishing this post, I have confirmed that the AI Action Plan is advisory, not binding like an executive order or statute. Its reference to forward/spot GPU markets is therefore a policy signal rather than a formal commitment. I still view it as meaningful momentum, in that it lowers the stigma for agencies and market participants to pursue the idea, but it does not guarantee implementation.

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Wihout a way to lock in future GPU prices, developers of AI data centers must rely on equity-heavy capital stacks or expensive debt. This slows the buildout of data centers and keeps compute scarce. The fix might come from a surprising place: a GPU futures contract. Backed by U.S. policy and derivatives-market expertise, it could turn GPUs into a bankable commodity, dropping project financing costs by hundreds of basis points and changing the economics of AI infrastructure overnight.

Two developments in the past year suggest that path dependency for such a market is already taking hold:

1. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan explicitly endorses the creation of forward and spot markets for GPU compute. This is not some throwaway bullet point. It’s a policy signal that the U.S. government wants market-based allocation of compute.

2. Compute Exchange, co-founded and funded by Don Wilson, the founder of DRW, one of the most formidable derivatives trading firms, is building an auction platform for GPU compute. If there’s anyone who knows how to take an illiquid, quirky OTC market and turn it into a liquid, standardized derivatives complex, it’s Wilson.

Put those together and you get the outlines of a market structure sequence we’ve seen before with other commodities: auction prices —> spot markets —> forwards —> listed futures². Once that wheel starts turning, the structural incentives are hard to reverse. That’s what path dependency means: the early decisions lock in the trajectory.

If that trajectory completes, the GPU futures curve will lower the cost of capital for data center developers, in some cases by hundreds of basis points.