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Silicon Data raises $30.5 million Series A to build the independent benchmark layer for the AI compute economy. Silicon Data, providing GPU performance data for companies, led by Carmen Li, and the team, has announced a $30.5 million initial closing of its Series A, led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with additional investment from CME Ventures, DRW, F-Prime, Samsung Next, VanEck, Further, Jump, Tectonic, and Wintermute. Breed, Hack, Blank VC, Sancus Ventures, and SoGal Ventures also participated. The Series A will support expansion across four areas: benchmark pricing, performance measurement through SiliconMark, institutional and alternative data, and risk infrastructure for derivatives, insurance, and credit markets. The funding comes as CME Group prepares to use Silicon Data benchmarks for its planned cash-settled GPU futures market, pending regulatory approval. The instrument would allow market participants to hedge exposure to changes in GPU rental prices using a published daily benchmark. Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li said compute is becoming a critical input for the global economy, while the infrastructure for measuring its value, performance, and risk remains underdeveloped. She said Silicon Data aims to provide the independent benchmarks needed to bring greater transparency and standardization to the compute market. Since raising a $4.7 million seed round in March 2025, Silicon Data has grown from a small data provider into a prominent player in compute economics, with more than 1,000 registered users across semiconductor manufacturers, AI companies, and financial institutions. The company has developed nine financial-grade indices covering GPUs and LLMs, alongside market intelligence and alternative datasets tracking supply, demand, utilization, pricing, and economics across the compute ecosystem. Part of the funding will support SiliconMark, which independently measures the real-world performance of GPU infrastructure. Identical GPUs can deliver different output depending on networking, topology, and configuration. By standardizing performance across clusters, SiliconMark can help market participants manage output risk and enable future physical delivery of compute resources. Atreides Management Managing Partner and CIO Gavin Baker said compute has become foundational to the AI economy, but lacks the pricing infrastructure that mature commodity markets use to manage risk. He said Silicon Data is building the benchmark and pricing layer needed to support compute futures and make large-scale AI infrastructure easier to finance. Valor Equity Partners Founder, CEO, and CIO Antonio Gracias said Silicon Data is building the measurement and market intelligence infrastructure needed as the compute economy expands. He highlighted the company's GPU pricing transparency and performance benchmarking as key tools for navigating market uncertainty and supporting the growth of AI infrastructure. Silicon Data spent two years building the pricing and performance data needed to support a compute futures market before one existed. The new funding will help establish common benchmarks across the compute ecosystem, giving buyers, sellers, exchanges, and financial institutions shared reference points. Remote Hire With Us: Menlo Talent helps technology companies hire exceptional remote talent from India. Build your team with carefully curated engineers, product leaders, designers, GTM professionals, and more. Learn More At: https://www.menlotimes.com/menlo-talent

Your reminder that a new(ish) high frequency trading firm is hiring in London and Singapore. 1 minute ago If you're looking for a job at an electronic trading firm, Jane Street is hiring, but Jane Street made a $15bn loss in July and is maybe not so shiny any more (despite being up $50bn in the year to last Friday). How about somewhere else instead? How about...Graviton? We have written about Graviton before. So has Bloomberg. Graviton is a high frequency trading firm (HFT) headquartered in India and founded by two unrelated 39 year-old graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, Ankit and Nishil Gupta. Bloomberg reported in April that Graviton was expanding in Singapore and London. Since then, it seems various building blocks have fallen into place. In Singapore, Graviton's operation is run by Brian West, a former head of Asia at DRW and employee at Jump Trading, who joined in 2022. Graviton opened a new Singapore office spread across two floors in June and is now hiring quant traders, quant researchers and a central execution trader to communicate with brokers and exchanges. It's also hired a global head of campus recruitment, Amanda Lim, who once worked for Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, and Michelle Lehoangonoc, who graduated from Nanyang Technological University in December and will be working in business development. In London, we reported in February that Graviton had hired Ian Jack, a former head of the European business for Hudson River Trading, to run its European office. Heenjin Yoon joined as the London-based head of business development around the same time as Jack but it's not clear whether the two have hired any people. Graviton isn't advertising any jobs in London yet. Nor is Jack listed as a director of a UK based entity on Companies House. The Guptas didn't immediately respond to a query about Graviton's hiring intentions. Graviton may be new to London and Singapore, but it is well established in India. Bloomberg said the firm was founded in 2014 and built a dominance in block trades on India's National Stock Exchange. Graviton was one of the first Indian firms to use field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), said Bloomberg. It also reportedly lets quants code in languages familiar to them and then converts the code into instructions executed directly onto the FPGAs. Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn. Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you'd like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate. The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits. Boost your career. Find thousands of job opportunities by signing up to eFinancialCareers today. Top Articles

CME Group to launch first futures contracts on AI computing power. CME Group and Silicon Data announced on Monday that they will launch the first regulated futures contracts tied to the rental price of artificial intelligence computing power, with trading set to begin on October 5 pending regulatory approval. The two contracts, the Silicon Data H100 Rental Index Future and the Silicon Data B200 Rental Index Future, will track hourly rental rates for Nvidia's H100 and next-generation Blackwell B200 graphics processing units, allowing companies and investors to hedge or speculate on the cost of the infrastructure that underpins modern AI systems. News summary. * CME Group and Silicon Data will launch two compute futures contracts on October 5, 2026, pending regulatory review. * The contracts will track Silicon Data's hourly GPU rental indexes for Nvidia's H100 and Blackwell B200 chips. * Each contract represents one month's rent for an Nvidia H100, settled financially against the benchmark index. * The products will be listed on NYMEX and cleared through CME Clearing. * Silicon Data, backed by trading firm DRW, publishes what it describes as the first daily GPU benchmarks for on-demand rental rates. How the contracts work. The futures will be cash-settled against Silicon Data's indexes, which aggregate hourly rental prices for GPU capacity across cloud providers and data center operators. Rather than delivering physical chips, the contracts will settle financially based on the average index price over the contract month. Each contract will represent one month of rent for a single Nvidia H100 GPU, priced in U.S. dollars. The B200 contract will use a similar structure tied to the newer Blackwell architecture. The products are designed for AI developers, cloud-service providers, and institutional investors who need to manage exposure to compute price volatility without taking physical delivery of hardware. A fragmented market. Silicon Data Chief Executive Officer Carmen Li said the launch addresses a pricing opacity problem that has plagued the compute market. "For years, two companies buying the exact same GPU capacity could pay wildly different prices with no way to know who got the better deal," Li said in a statement provided to CNBC. "They will now have a benchmark to check that against." Li, a former Bloomberg and DRW employee, founded Silicon Data in April 2024 to bring financial-market infrastructure to GPU pricing. The company has since published daily rental indexes for the A100, H100, and B200, along with forward curves and hyperscaler benchmarks. DRW, the Chicago-based trading firm founded by Don Wilson, provided seed backing. You Might Be Interested In Pete Keavey, global head of energy and environmental products at CME Group, compared compute to oil in a statement. "Just as oil fueled the 20th century economy and evolved from spot trading into a global derivatives market, our futures contracts will now turn compute into a standardized, tradable commodity that will provide global businesses with a reliable, regulated venue to manage price risk," he said. The broader infrastructure push. The launch arrives as Wall Street builds new financial instruments around the AI infrastructure boom. Nvidia is working with several of the world's largest asset managers on an effort that could channel as much as $500 billion into AI data centers and related infrastructure, according to prior reporting. Compute futures add a derivatives layer to that ecosystem. Instead of investing directly in data centers, chipmakers, or cloud providers, investors can now gain exposure to the underlying price of computing capacity itself. For AI labs and hyperscalers, the contracts offer a hedging mechanism against the sharp price swings that have characterized the GPU rental market. CME Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy said in a May announcement that "compute is the new oil of the 21st century" and that "every AI model trained, every transaction cleared, and every byte of data processed runs on compute, which is becoming a fast-emerging asset class in its own right." The contracts remain subject to regulatory review. CME Group has not specified which regulator is conducting the review, though NYMEX operates under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. You Might Be Interested In