CFTC extends review of Nvidia GPU rental futures by 60 days

Regulators push their decision on NYMEX's compute-power contracts to January 8, 2027, citing complex questions about liquidity and manipulation Wall Street wants to sell futures on AI computing power. Washington wants a little more time to think about it. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is extending its review of two compute-power futures contracts by 60 days. The new deadline is January 8, 2027, up from the previous date of November 9, 2026. The contracts come from NYMEX, a CME Group subsidiary. They would let traders bet on, or hedge against, the hourly cost of renting Nvidia GPUs in the United States. What is actually under review The two contracts are tied to a pair of benchmarks built by Silicon Data. One is the H100 Rental Index and the other is the B200 Rental Index. Both indices track the hourly on-demand rental price for Nvidia GPUs within the US. Each futures contract covers 730 GPU-hours. Settlement is in cash, based on the monthly average of the relevant index. Prices are quoted in US dollars per GPU-hour. Nobody gets a pallet of graphics cards at expiration. There is no physical delivery of hardware, so these are purely financial instruments pegged to a...