On 19 August 2026, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) published a formal request for public comment (RFC) on the listing of derivative contracts referencing computing power ('compute') in U.S. designated contract markets (DCMs). The CFTC identified compute as a growing and price-volatile input for AI development and deployment and noted that market participants have expressed interest in derivatives to manage compute cost exposure.
The RFC invites comment under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) on four defined areas: the size, liquidity, and structure of the underlying cash market for compute; market oversight and manipulation concerns specific to compute; customer protection considerations; and the design of perpetual compute futures, a structure that settles against a continuously updated index and has no delivery date. Under CEA Section 5c(c), a DCM may list a new contract without prior CFTC approval if it meets the Act's core principles, but the CFTC retains authority to stay or remove any listed contract.
AI developers, cloud computing providers, data centre operators, and financial intermediaries that trade or plan to trade compute contracts are the primary parties with a direct regulatory interest. Listed compute futures would allow AI companies to lock in GPU or TPU access costs. For financial intermediaries, the contracts would require compliance with CFTC Part 23 swap dealer rules or DCM trading rules depending on the contract's legal characterisation. A CFTC finding that compute is a commodity under the CEA would extend the Commission's anti-manipulation authority under CEA Section 6(c)(3) to compute spot markets.
The RFC is not a proposed rule and does not commit the CFTC to rulemaking. Public comments are due 60 days from publication in the Federal Register. Key open questions include whether compute units are sufficiently standardisable to support reliable derivatives settlement and whether current cash markets provide enough price transparency to underpin a manipulation-resistant reference index.
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