Descriptions:
Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li joins Bloomberg Tech to announce a $30.5 million Series A round led by Gavin Baker’s Atreides Management AI Fund, with participation from CME Group, F Prime (Fidelity’s venture arm), DRW, and Jump Trading. The raise is designed to accelerate Silicon Data’s ambition to become what Li calls the ‘independent referee for the whole compute stack’ — building continuously updated pricing and performance indices as new chips and models come online.
The biggest news in the segment is the confirmation that CME plans to launch GPU futures on October 5, 2026, cash-settled against Silicon Data’s H100 and H100 Neo Cloud on-demand indices. Li explains the two natural trading sides: compute owners who want to short futures to hedge rental rate volatility, and compute consumers who want to lock in long positions at current prices. The structure is explicitly positioned alongside NVIDIA’s $500 billion financing initiative — that deal provides the financing layer, while CME/Silicon Data provide the risk management layer that a market of that size requires.
On current GPU pricing data, Li notes that A100 and H100 spot prices are up roughly 20% since January 2026 but have been stable for the past 20 days, and argues that depreciation in server hardware does not automatically translate to loss of economic value — residual pricing depends on future cash flows from ongoing utilization, with older chips like the A100 still commanding rates because they serve smaller model workloads and ML inference use cases.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published August 12, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
