The most important market of the future could be in LLM tokens. Financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for them, with China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens.

Major derivatives exchanges, such as CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange (the owner of the NYSE), have separately announced plans to launch futures contracts for renting GPUs. While mature markets exist for GPU rentals, there is less infrastructure around tokens themselves: enterprise plans for major AI companies are commonly denominated in tokens.

For instance, OpenAI charges $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens if you want to use its GPT-5.5 model API. Even cloud providers such as Amazon’s Bedrock system offer the opportunity to charge per token. This effort comes amid an unprecedented buildout of AI infrastructure, with cloud service providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players pouring hundreds of billions into building data centers.

Shanghai’s exchange 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. An emerging crop of global neocloud companies is also vying for a piece of this demand, specializing in inference or competing with cloud giants like Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud.