Just like gold and oil, we’ll soon be able to trade AI token futures

就像黄金和石油一样，我们很快就能交易人工智能代币期货了

The most important market of the future could be in LLM tokens — and financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for them. China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens, Reuters reports. 未来最重要的市场可能就是大语言模型（LLM）代币市场——各大金融集团正竞相为其构建新的基础设施。据路透社报道，中国上海期货交易所目前正在设计一个人工智能代币衍生品市场。

The news comes as major derivatives exchange CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange (the owner of the NYSE) have separately said they’re working on launching futures contracts for renting GPUs. GPU markets are still maturing, but given the wide range of companies using, selling, and renting GPUs, there’s a robust market for spot prices on GPU rental, typically charged by the hour. 与此同时，大型衍生品交易所芝加哥商品交易所集团（CME Group）和洲际交易所（纽约证券交易所的所有者）也分别表示，他们正致力于推出 GPU 租赁期货合约。尽管 GPU 市场尚处于成熟阶段，但鉴于使用、销售和租赁 GPU 的公司范围广泛，GPU 租赁的现货价格市场（通常按小时计费）已经相当稳健。

According to data from AI Mining Co., which tracks daily GPU rental pricing across 28 marketplaces and cloud providers, median prices for Nvidia H100 GPUs ranged from $1.40 to $4.27 per hour across 13 marketplaces, while the average price for H200 GPUs were between $2.34 and $5 per hour across 10 marketplaces. And just over the past seven days, average H100 prices ranged from $2.79 to $3.33. 根据追踪 28 个市场和云服务提供商每日 GPU 租赁价格的 AI Mining Co. 的数据，在 13 个市场中，英伟达 H100 GPU 的中位价格在每小时 1.40 美元至 4.27 美元之间，而 10 个市场中 H200 GPU 的平均价格在每小时 2.34 美元至 5 美元之间。在过去七天里，H100 的平均价格范围在 2.79 美元至 3.33 美元之间。

But while mature markets exist for GPUs, there’s less infrastructure around tokens themselves — the fundamental building blocks of contemporary AI models. Enterprise plans for major AI companies are commonly denominated in tokens: OpenAI, for example, charges $5 per million input tokens, and $30 per million output tokens if you want to use the API for its latest GPT-5.5 model. Even cloud providers are increasingly offering the opportunity to charge per token, as in Amazon’s Bedrock system. 虽然 GPU 市场已经成熟，但围绕代币本身——即当代人工智能模型的基本构建模块——的基础设施却相对较少。大型人工智能企业的企业计划通常以代币计价：例如，如果你想使用 OpenAI 最新 GPT-5.5 模型的 API，其收费标准为每百万输入代币 5 美元，每百万输出代币 30 美元。甚至云服务提供商也越来越多地提供按代币收费的选项，例如亚马逊的 Bedrock 系统。

The effort comes amid an unprecedented buildout of AI infrastructure. Cloud service providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players alike have poured hundreds of billions into building data centers, anticipating that demand for GPUs and compute will continue to rise. An emerging crop of global neocloud companies is also vying for a piece of this demand. Some of these new entrants are specializing, focusing on inference, while others are competing with cloud giants like Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud to offer their services to AI companies. 这一举措正值人工智能基础设施建设空前高涨之际。云服务提供商、私募股权公司和基础设施参与者纷纷投入数千亿美元建设数据中心，预计对 GPU 和计算能力的需求将持续增长。一批新兴的全球“新云”（neocloud）公司也在争夺这一市场份额。其中一些新进入者专注于推理领域，而另一些则与甲骨文、AWS 和谷歌云等云巨头竞争，向人工智能公司提供服务。

By targeting AI tokens, the Shanghai exchange’s derivative product would be tied to how AI companies price their services, giving businesses, investors, and data center operators a way to hedge against the cost of compute. 通过瞄准人工智能代币，上海期货交易所的衍生品将与人工智能公司的服务定价挂钩，从而为企业、投资者和数据中心运营商提供一种对冲计算成本的手段。