Meet the startup helping Wall Street put a price on AI compute
Theresa Loconsolo
Wed, August 19, 2026 at 10:56 PM GMT+5:30
1 min read
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The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute — or for firms to hedge their exposure when the price changes.
Silicon Data just closed a $30 million Series A to change that. The startup aims to become the reference price for GPU rental and an index that a Wall Street futures contract would settle against. The company plans to launch its compute futures trading on the CME October 5th, pending regulatory approval. On this episode of TechCrunch’s<a href="https://techcrunch.com/podcasts/equity/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”> Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Steve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, to discuss the health of the AI buildout, and why the data is telling a different story than the doom and gloom headlines about depreciating chips and stalled data centers.
