“Compute Is the New Oil”: Kalshi Just Launched a Way to Bet on the Future Price of AI Computing Power Quick Read – CME and ICE are racing Kalshi to own compute futures, with both incumbents posting operating margins near 70% as the prize. – Kalshi’s new CRO Uday Shah defected…
om CME, the very exchange that is currently suing the CFTC to block Kalshi’s perpetual futures. – Kalshi thinks the most important commodity of the AI era is compute. The CFTC-regulated prediction market just launched what it calls the first market-driven forward curve for GPU computing power, a way to bet on where the price of AI processing is headed
The product was unveiled in a Bloomberg exclusive by Uday Shah, Kalshi’s newly appointed Chief Risk Officer and a 16-year veteran of CME Group. It plots future prices of computing power and positions Kalshi squarely in a brewing fight with the biggest names in derivatives. Both CME Group (NASDAQ:CME) and Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE:ICE) have announced their own compute futures products.
The Pitch: Compute Is the New Oil Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour has been direct about the ambition. “Compute is the new oil,” he has said, adding that “compute futures will eventually dwarf oil futures.” The numbers behind the claim are staggering. Hyperscalers have committed “north of $500 to $600 billion just for 2026” to computing infrastructure, according to Kalshi, with total addressable market estimates stretching into the trillions. The launch follows a May 2024 prediction from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the Milken Institute that “a new asset class will be buying futures of compute.” Two years later, that new asset class is being built in real time.