CITIC Securities: Computing power futures may be launched within the year, marking the first year of financialization of computing power

Golden Ten Data reported on May 14 that CITIC Securities’ research report states that CME Group and Silicon Data plan to launch the world's first cash-settled futures anchored to GPU computing power rental rates in 2026, marking computing power as “the new oil of the 21st century” and potentially reaching a key milestone in assetization and financialization. At present, the global computing power market already meets the three core prerequisites for establishing a derivatives market: a trillion-level market scale, intense price volatility caused by supply-demand mismatch, and substantial risk exposure across upstream and downstream industry participants. The introduction of computing power futures comes at the perfect moment and will effectively address the industry's long-standing lack of price hedging tools. Although this product still faces challenges such as standardizing computing power, ensuring transparency in spot pricing, and confirming delivery rights, once implemented, it is expected to reinvent the AI industry chain’s financial ecosystem across four dimensions: hedging, price discovery, resource allocation optimization, and ecosystem prosperity, systematically enhancing the asset quality and earning certainty of the entire industry chain. From the investment perspective, the financialization of computing power is expected to benefit four core areas: cloud vendors, AI applications, computing power leasing, and AI computing power hardware.