[Digital Today reporter Yoonseo Lee] Layer 1 (L1) blockchain platform Injective has launched a perpetual futures market that tracks Nvidia GPU rental rates.

Cointelegraph reported on Oct. 26 that the product was designed to let traders bet on swings in artificial intelligence (AI) computing costs with up to 10x leverage.

The new index, the Super Intelligence Compute Index (SICI), reflects rental rates for five GPUs including Nvidia's H100, B200, H200, A100 and RTX 4090. Market data firm LO:TECH calculates the index by aggregating data from computing resource trading platforms.

The H100 has the biggest weight at 40 percent, followed by the B200 at 25 percent. The index is updated hourly based on average rental rates over the past seven days. Traders can use USDC as margin and invest in both rising and falling prices.

Injective said companies developing AI models often rent computing resources from cloud providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius rather than buying Nvidia GPUs directly. It said that because rental rates rise and fall with demand, the futures market could help developers hedge high computing costs and give GPU suppliers a way to prepare for falling rental revenue.

The product was launched as concerns grow over profitability in the AI infrastructure rental business. Gartner warned in an October report that more than 80 percent of specialised AI cloud providers, or neoclouds, may not be able to continue operating independently through 2030. It judged that they may struggle to generate returns commensurate with the scale of their investment.

Elon Musk also said about 200 neocloud providers could go bankrupt or face pressure to merge. He also mentioned that financial institutions may be reluctant to lend to companies that depend on AI data centre revenue.

The product is drawing attention for expanding the range of underlying assets for crypto derivatives to AI infrastructure costs. With GPU rental rates directly affecting the profits of AI developers and infrastructure providers, attention is focused on whether onchain derivatives will take hold as a tool to manage rental price volatility.

The next major financial market for AI is the price of compute. Today, Injective is officially releasing the Super Intelligence Compute Index ($SICI), bringing a new financial primitive to the onchain AI economy. For the first time on Injective, traders can access a diversified index of @nvidia GPU rental prices through perpetuals with up to 10x leverage. We also plan to introduce a brand new financial primitive to access $SICI in the coming days. A New Onchain Market for the Agentic Economy Trillions are set to be invested into AI infrastructure. From frontier model training to autonomous agents and inference, demand for compute is becoming one of the defining forces shaping the AI industry. This trend is only accelerating with giants like @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI surging in demand. Yet financial markets for compute remain largely underdeveloped, with rental prices fragmented across cloud providers and hardware generations. $SICI changes that. SICI brings five NVIDIA GPU rental rates together into a single onchain benchmark. The index consists of the following: → H100 (Industry standard for AI training): 40% → B200 (Next-generation AI training and inference): 25% → H200 (High-memory AI training and inference): 15% → A100 (Fine-tuning and AI inference): 10% → RTX 4090 (Consumer GPU for affordable AI inference): 10% Using hourly compute marketplace data, SICI creates a novel way to access and trade the economics of AI infrastructure. Injective is building the onchain financial markets of tomorrow Injective pioneered the first onchain H100 rental market, launched the $AIX index, and introduced pre-IPO perpetuals for companies including OpenAI, @SpaceX and Anthropic. $SICI takes this vision further. First, Injective brought market exposure to the companies building the future of AI onchain. Now, we're bringing the cost of the infrastructure powering them onchain too. And we will soon be launching entirely new financial primitives to access the onchain agentic economy. The AI economy is creating entirely new asset classes. Injective is building the financial markets to access them for the first time onchain.