Layer-1 blockchain Injective has introduced a perpetual futures market linked to rental prices for five Nvidia GPUs, supporting leverage of up to 10x. The Super Intelligence Compute Index (SICI) covers Nvidia's H100, B200, H200, A100 and RTX 4090 chips. London-based market data company LO:TECH compiles the underlying data from compute marketplaces.
Monday's announcement gives the H100 the largest index weighting, at 40%. The announcement assigns the B200 a 25% weighting. The announcement says the index refreshes every hour based on a trailing seven-day average of rental prices. Traders can position for increases or decreases in the index and provide USDC as margin. Injective introduced a market linked to H100 rental prices in August 2025, and the new launch extends coverage to five GPU models.
AI model developers frequently rent computing capacity from cloud providers including CoreWeave and Nebius instead of buying Nvidia GPUs. Rental prices fluctuate with demand. Injective said the futures market could help developers hedge increases in computing costs. Injective said GPU providers could use the market to protect against falling rental revenue.
AI computing providers face questions about recovering the expense of constructing and operating GPU infrastructure. Research firm Gartner warned in October that more than 80% of specialist AI cloud providers, called neoclouds, could lose independent status by 2030 because of inadequate investment returns. Elon Musk said Sunday that more than 200 neocloud providers could fail or consolidate as lenders grow reluctant to finance businesses reliant on AI data center revenue.
Musk has financial exposure to the sector through SpaceX. SpaceX's "Super Intelligence" business recently reported third-quarter revenue of $7.6 billion, an 830% increase from a year earlier. New cloud services agreements contributed to that growth.
Major technology companies are reorganizing to limit costs while investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure. Bloomberg reported Monday that Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 eligible employees to cut costs amid increasing AI infrastructure spending. Microsoft has projected approximately $175 billion in capital expenditures for 2026. Meta has invested more than $100 billion in AI. Meta eliminated 8,000 jobs in May through a restructuring intended to lower costs.