Meet the startup helping Wall Street put a price on AI compute

Silicon Data closed a $30 million Series A to become the reference price for GPU rental and an index for Wall Street futures contracts. The company plans to launch compute futures trading on the CME on October 5, pending regulatory approval, aiming to help firms hedge against AI compute price changes.

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 https://www.cmegroup.com/media-room/press-releases/2026/8/11/cme group and silicondatatolaunchcomputefuturesonoctober5tounloc.html , pending regulatory approval. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity https://techcrunch.com/podcasts/equity/ podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Steve Hou https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-hou-001/ , 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 https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/texas-halts-new-data-centers-as-governor-calls-for-audits/ data centers https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/new-york-state-halts-construction-of-all-new-data-centers/ . Subscribe to Equity on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TechCrunch , Apple Podcasts https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1215439780 , Overcast https://overcast.fm/itunes1215439780/equity , Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5IEYLip3eDppcOmy5DmphC?si=rZDFHv2sQUul g94iCRgpQ and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X https://twitter.com/EquityPod and Threads https://www.threads.net/@equitypod , at @EquityPod.