Like gold and oil, we will soon be able to trade the future of AI tokens

The most important market of the future may be in LLM tokens – and financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for them.

China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently developing a market based on AI tokens, Reuters reports reports. The news comes as a great exchange The CME group and Intercontinental Exchange (its NYSE owner) has said separately that it is working to launch futures contracts for GPUs.

The GPU market is still growing, but due to the number of companies that use, sell, and rent GPUs, there is a fixed price market for GPU rentals, which are paid by the hour. According to data from Opinions of the company AI Mining Co.which tracks daily GPU rental prices in 28 markets and cloud providers, the average price of Nvidia H100 GPUs ranged from $1.40 to $4.27 per hour in 13 markets, while the average price of H200 GPUs was between $2.34 and $5 per hour in 10 markets. And just seven days ago, average H100 prices ranged from $2.79 to $3.33.

But while mature markets exist for GPUs, there are few tools around the tokens themselves – the building blocks of modern AI models. The corporate plans of the big AI companies are usually in tokens: OpenAI, for example, pays $5 for a million input tokens, and $30 for a million output tokens if you want to use the API on its latest GPT-5.5 version. Even cloud providers are offering the option to pay for each token, as it is Amazon’s Bedrock System.

The exercise comes amid an unprecedented build-up of artificial intelligence. Cloud providers, enterprise enterprises, and security players have poured hundreds of billions into building data centers, hoping that demand for GPUs and compute will continue to rise. Plants growing all over the world neocloud companies they are also fighting for part of this demand. Some of these new entrants are established, focusing on data, while others are competing with cloud giants such as Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud to provide their services to the AI ​​industry.

Looking at AI tokens, the Shanghai-based data can be linked to how AI companies buy their services, giving businesses, investors, and data center operators a way to deal with the cost of computing.