Banks want to lend against them. Insurers want to protect them. Investors want to trade them.
A financial ecosystem is forming around Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), as Wall Street tries to turn the AI chips into a new asset class, like real estate, oil, and agricultural commodities.
The AI boom sparked a scramble for Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips — and a financial market has emerged because they’re too expensive to buy outright. But if companies can borrow money against the chips themselves, it could unlock hundreds of billions of dollars for new AI infrastructure — and help realize Nvidia’s vision of abundant compute.
A new financial playbook has taken shape. Nvidia is acting as a guarantor for deals. Insurers are protecting against falling GPU values. And companies like Amazon are putting GPUs into separate entities instead of owning them directly.
As the market matures, it’s also creating new jobs. Some AI cloud providers are hiring full-time compute traders to buy and sell GPU contracts that lock in future prices, said Ethan Vera, chief operating officer of Luxor Technology.
Whether any of it works hinges on these questions: how much will chips be worth over time, and how resellable are they?
Nvidia keeps releasing new generations at a rapid cadence, raising fears that today’s chips could quickly lose value.
Nvidia’s chips are backing billion-dollar loans
GPU financing took off in the early 2020s, when banks and private credit firms began lending money to AI cloud providers.
A major contract between CoreWeave and Microsoft in 2023 gave lenders confidence that their loans to buy GPUs would be repaid, said Billy Libby, cofounder and CEO of investment firm Upper90.
Now, instead of relying on contracts, lenders are increasingly considering whether GPUs themselves can serve as collateral, said Bernie Margulies, CEO of GPU financing startup American Compute. For now, customer contracts do most of the heavy lifting.
Still, Wall Street’s interest is growing. Nvidia has enlisted BlackRock, Apollo, and Goldman Sachs to help raise more than $500 billion to finance AI infrastructure.
Turning GPUs into a tradable asset
If financing is the first step, the next is building a marketplace where companies can lock in future GPU prices — and speculators can take bets for and against this asset.
For a futures market to work, GPUs need a trusted price, said Carmen Li, CEO of Silicon Data. That’s why companies like Silicon Data, Compute Desk, and Ornn are creating indexes that standardize chip rental prices.
Unlike a barrel of oil, there’s no universal price for compute, which depends on the model of the chip, where it’s located, and other factors. Regulators have also raised concerns about whether some nascent GPU indexes might be manipulated.
If these indexes gain traction, they could pave the way for a GPU futures market, which investors could use to bet on where prices are headed.
In some ways, that future is already here. People are already betting on GPU prices on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where users have made bets on how much Nvidia’s B200 chips will cost to rent by the end of October.
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