The most important market of the future could be the LLM token, and financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for it.
China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens, Reuters reported. The news comes as major derivatives exchanges CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) announced that they are each working on launching futures contracts to rent GPUs.
Although the GPU market is still mature, given that a wide range of companies use, sell, and rent GPUs, there is a robust market for spot prices for GPU rentals, which are typically billed by the hour. According to data from AI Mining Co., which tracks daily GPU rental prices across 28 marketplaces and cloud providers, the median price for the Nvidia H100 GPU ranged from $1.40 to $4.27 per hour across 13 marketplaces, while the average price for the H200 GPU ranged from $2.34 to $5 per hour across 10 marketplaces. Over the past 7 days, the average price of H100 ranged from $2.79 to $3.33.
However, while there is a mature market for GPUs, there is less infrastructure around the tokens themselves, a fundamental building block of modern AI models. Enterprise plans from major AI companies are typically priced in tokens. For example, OpenAI charges $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens when using the latest GPT-5.5 model API. Even cloud providers are increasingly offering the opportunity to charge per token, like Amazon’s Bedrock system.
This effort comes amid an unprecedented build-out of AI infrastructure. Cloud service providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players have all poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers in anticipation of continued growth in demand for GPUs and computing. Global neo-cloud startups are also vying for some of this demand. Some of these new entrants are specialized with a focus on inference, while others compete with cloud giants like Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud to serve AI companies.
By targeting AI tokens, the Shanghai Exchange’s derivative products will be tied to the pricing of AI companies’ services, giving companies, investors and data center operators a way to hedge their computing costs.
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