The most promising market of the future may revolve around LLM tokens—and financial institutions are racing to build the necessary infrastructure to support them. According to Reuters, China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently developing a derivatives market specifically for AI tokens. This development follows separate announcements from major derivatives exchange CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange (which owns the NYSE) that they are working on launching futures contracts for renting GPUs.

GPU markets are still evolving, but given the wide range of companies that use, sell, and rent GPUs, there is already a robust spot market for GPU rental, typically priced by the hour. Data from AI Mining Co., which tracks daily GPU rental pricing across 28 marketplaces and cloud providers, shows that median prices for Nvidia H100 GPUs ranged from $1.40 to $4.27 per hour across 13 marketplaces, while average prices for H200 GPUs fell between $2.34 and $5 per hour across 10 marketplaces. Over the past seven days alone, average H100 prices have ranged from $2.79 to $3.33.

However, while mature markets exist for GPUs, there is far less infrastructure surrounding tokens themselves—the fundamental building blocks of modern AI models. Enterprise pricing from major AI companies is commonly based on tokens: OpenAI, for instance, charges $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens for API access to its latest GPT-5.5 model. Even cloud providers are increasingly offering per-token pricing, as seen with Amazon’s Bedrock system.

This push comes amid an unprecedented buildout of AI infrastructure. Cloud service providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players have collectively poured hundreds of billions into constructing data centers, betting that demand for GPUs and computing power will continue to surge. A new wave of global neocloud companies is also competing for a share of this demand. Some of these entrants specialize in inference, while others go head-to-head with cloud giants like Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud to offer services to AI companies. By targeting AI tokens, the Shanghai exchange’s derivative product would be directly tied to how AI companies price their services, providing businesses, investors, and data center operators with a way to hedge against the cost of compute.