Seth Klarman's Baupost Group opened three new positions in the second quarter, according to 13F filings. The largest new stake is CME Group, where the value investor bought 619,000 shares worth approximately $136.69 million, representing 2.52% of Baupost's portfolio. The fund also acquired 1,274,356 shares of Axalta Coating Systems worth roughly $43.61 million and 392,000 shares of Pagaya Technologies worth about $12.88 million. CME Group operates financial exchanges for futures and options trading. The company's second-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings per share both rose 1% year over year, whilst open interest increased 8% to 127 million contracts. CME trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 22.42 times, nearly double the sector median.

A futures market for AI compute — the processing capacity needed to train and run AI models — is in development, treating it like commodities such as oil or grain. CME Group announced plans to launch two compute futures contracts on 5 October, pending regulatory approval. Each contract would represent a month's rent for an Nvidia H100 or Blackwell B200 chip. The exchange is working with Silicon Data, which publishes indices tracking compute pricing. New York-based OneChronos is also developing a compute futures marketplace, awaiting federal regulatory approval. CEO Kelly Littlepage expects it to be operational this year. The challenge is that compute isn't truly a commodity — it's not fungible, storable, or transportable. OneChronos is using combinatorial auctions to address this issue.

Silicon Data, a NYC-based provider of a market intelligence platform for the AI compute economy, raised $30.5M in the initial closing of its Series A funding