Could AI futures be the next big commodity?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

There is growing demand for time with GPUs, the chips that power artificial intelligence.

AI companies need those chips in order to keep their models up and running, and to do that,

they can reserve time with a GPU. Now there's interest from Wall Street in creating a futures market

for this AI compute time, essentially treating it like a commodity.

Liz Hoffman of Semaphore recently wrote about this in a piece called The Future of AI is an AI futures market.

I talked about it with her, starting with a primer on how futures markets work.

They are a way to bet on what something will cost in the future. The biggest

one that you might be familiar with is the oil market. You can bet on what a barrel of oil will cost

in one month, three months, six months, whatever. There's sort of two uses. One is pure speculation.

And the other is that there's a lot of big companies in the world that are really

exposed to oil prices going up and down, as we've seen over the last, you know, eight weeks.

And so they are a way to hedge those risks. So if you are an oil producer, you are exposed to the

risk that oil prices will drop. If you are an oil consumer, your risk is that it will get more expensive.

And that is a two-sided market that the futures contracts market try to connect.

Right. It helps lock in the price for both sides. I know a couple of financial exchanges

recently announced their intention to launch what they're calling compute futures.

Tell me what those are.

This is what it costs to rent a GPU for an hour if you are OpenAI or Gemini or an AI startup.

And the price of these have been all over the place. Generally speaking, they have gotten more

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