ICE Chief Sprecher Says Lenders Could Force Data Centre Borrowers to Hedge GPU Prices

"It may be that the capital markets require that, given how much money is being lent," Sprecher said in the interview, held at the futures industry's annual conference in Chicago. That would give exchanges the hedging demand they need to turn AI compute into a traded commodity, something ICE and its rivals have been working on for most of this year.

The obstacle is that futures usually grow out of an established spot market, and compute does not really have one. The biggest buyers, the hyperscale cloud and AI companies, rent capacity under confidential contracts, so most public price data comes from the patchier offerings of smaller neocloud providers. Sprecher called himself "bullish but cautious" and said the industry was working "backwards".

ICE announced in May that it would launch a suite of cash-settled, dollar-denominated GPU compute futures with Ornn, based on Ornn's Compute Price Index. ICE said at the time that the index is built only from completed transactions and covers Nvidia's H100, H200 and B200 chips and the RTX 5090, and that the contracts need regulatory approval. That announcement gave no launch date. CME Group and Nodal Exchange have announced competing compute futures plans this year.

The bigger uncertainty is in Washington. Semafor has reported that pressure from the Trump administration led Kalshi to drop one of its GPU price trackers in September. Sprecher put that pressure down to concern that open pricing for AI compute could put the United States at a disadvantage against China. He said he expected officials to side with markets in the end, while acknowledging that the industry was waiting for a decision.

"The United States is a free market and that has always advantaged us vis-à-vis China, so I suspect that's where they'll come out," he said.