A new futures market for semiconductors will let traders hedge their artificial intelligence investments with bets on the increasingly expensive price of computing power.

Contracts on the new “compute futures market” from CME Group will be based on graphics processing units (GPU) price indexes from Silicon Data, the companies said in a statement released Tuesday announcing the joint venture, which still is pending regulatory review.

The new market will let investors lock in a price for computing capacity based on a GPU benchmark, which can be used to hedge against rising GPU rental rates and other operational costs in the enormous and multifaceted AI buildout.

“GPU markets … have historically lacked standardized reference pricing,” Carmen Li, chief executive of Silicon Data, said in the release. “The launch of compute futures is an important step toward giving AI builders, cloud providers and investors more reliable tools for valuation, hedging and long-term planning.”

Futures markets are traditionally associated with basic commodities like foodstuffs, metals, and petroleum products, but they’ve also popped up for assembled components in rapidly developing segments of advanced industrial sectors.

During the broadband explosion in the late 1990s, the broadband services division of Enron aimed to sell unused capacity on its network of fiber optic cables prior to the company’s spectacular failure.

Silicon Data sells access to specialized price indexes to clients, similar to the consumer price index or personal consumption expenditures price index, except for semiconductors. Its products include a standardized GPU price index, a RAM index and projections for GPU rental prices.

Wall Street doesn’t see demand for GPUs, or more traditional central processing units (CPUs), slowing down any time soon.

“Agentic AI requires entirely new racks of CPU servers that sit alongside GPU infrastructure and run to power the work of all these agents,” analyst Shawn Kim at Morgan Stanley wrote in a report Monday.

“The AI system in the future will look like a distributed system consisting of GPU racks for dense model compute … [and] agentic CPU racks for orchestration, processing data and tool execution,” Kim said.

Memory chip prices soared in the first quarter as AI drove increased demand for CPUs. Hyperscalers increased capital spending across the board while executives expressed concerns about a bottleneck in memory that’s driving input costs higher.

Memory chip makers are projecting huge profit margins through this year and next as valuations have skyrocketed.

Anthropic’s Claude can now use a person’s computer to complete tasks as the company looks to create an AI agent that can rival the viral OpenClaw.

Users can now message Claude a task from a phone, and the AI agent will then complete that task, Anthropic announced Monday.

After being prompted, Claude can open apps on your computer, navigate a web browser and fill in spreadsheets, Anthropic said. One prompt Anthropic demonstrated in a video posted Monday is a user running late for a meeting. The user asks Claude to export a pitch deck as a PDF file and attach it to a meeting invite. The video shows Claude carrying out the task.

The latest update from Anthropic underscores the push from AI firms to create so-called “agents” that can autonomously carry out tasks on behalf of users at any time of day.

Agentic capabilities were thrust into the spotlight this year after the release of OpenClaw, which went viral. OpenClaw links to AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. A user can message OpenClaw through popular apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to carry out tasks. Like Anthropic’s new feature, OpenClaw runs locally on a user’s device giving it access to files.

Singapore-based software firm Horizon Quantum on Wednesday said it has become the first private company to run a quantum computer for commercial use in the city-state, marking a milestone ahead of its plans to list in the U.S.

The start-up, founded in 2018 by quantum researcher Joe Fitzsimons, said the machine is now fully operational. It integrates components from quantum computing suppliers, including Maybell Quantum, Quantum Machines and Rigetti Computing.

According to Horizon Quantum, the new computer also makes it the first pure-play quantum software firm to own its own quantum computer — an integration it hopes will help advance the promising technology.

“Our focus is on helping developers to start harnessing quantum computers to do real-world work,” Fitzsimons, the CEO, told CNBC. “How do we take full advantage of these systems? How do we program them?” 

Horizon Quantum builds the software tools and infrastructure needed to power applications for quantum computing systems. 

“Although we’re very much focused on the software side, it’s really important to understand how the stack works down to the physical level … that’s the reason we have a test bed now,” Fitzsimons said. 

A top executive at Google working on quantum computers told CNBC in March that he believes the technology is only five years away from running practical applications.

Still, today’s quantum systems remain in the nascent stages of development and pose many engineering and programming challenges.

Investment in the space has been rising, however, as major tech companies report technological breakthroughs. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, along with the U.S. government, are already pouring millions into quantum computing.

Investor attention also received a bump in June after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang offered upbeat remarks, saying quantum computing is nearing an “inflection point” and that practical uses may arrive sooner than he had expected.

Horizon Quantum’s announcement comes ahead of a merger with dMY Squared Technology Group Inc., a special purpose acquisition company. The deal, agreed upon in September, aims to take Horizon public on the Nasdaq…