The most important market of the future may well be AI tokens—while major financial institutions accelerate infrastructure development around them. According to Reuters, the Shanghai Futures Exchange in China is currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens. Meanwhile, global derivatives giants CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) have separately announced plans to launch futures contracts for GPU rentals. While the GPU market remains maturing, its spot rental sector has already become quite active due to the wide variety of companies using, selling, and renting GPUs, typically charging on an hourly basis. Data from AI Mining Co., which tracks daily rental prices across 28 markets and cloud providers, shows that Nvidia's H100 GPUs command median rates between $1.40 and $4.27 per hour across 13 markets, while H200 GPUs average $2.34 to $5 per hour across 10 markets. Over the past week, H100 average prices fluctuated between $2.79 and $3.33. However, despite the relative maturity of the GPU market, infrastructure surrounding tokens themselves remains scarce—even though tokens serve as fundamental building blocks for contemporary AI models. Enterprise-grade packages offered by leading AI firms price services based on tokens: OpenAI, for instance, charges $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens for API access via its latest GPT-5.5 model. Even cloud platforms like AWS Bedrock increasingly support billing by token count. This move coincides with an unprecedented wave of investment in AI infrastructure. Cloud service providers, private equity firms, and infrastructure players have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into data center construction, anticipating continued surges in demand for GPUs and computing power. A cohort of emerging global "new cloud" companies is also vying for this share of demand—some focusing specifically on inference workloads, others competing directly with cloud giants such as Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud to deliver cloud services tailored for AI enterprises. By targeting AI tokens, the Shanghai exchange's derivative products will link directly to pricing structures used by AI company services, offering businesses, investors, and data center operators effective hedging tools against computational cost volatility.