Compute, Power and the Rise of AI Infrastructure Markets
Building Price Discovery and Risk Management for the AI Economy
Published October 2026
Download PDFFor most of the past two decades a company's compute bill was an IT expense. The firm bought servers or rented them from a cloud provider, and the price it paid rarely appeared in anyone's risk report. Large-scale AI changed that. A frontier training run occupies a very large cluster of accelerators for months, a successful product launch can multiply inference demand within days, and a lab that cannot get the newest chips may ship after its competitors. The hourly price of a GPU now drives investment decisions worth billions of dollars, but it is set mostly in private negotiation, and a company that wants to fix next year's price has very few ways of doing so.
We expect the market that forms around this exposure to have two legs. One is compute, which is already sold by hyperscale clouds, specialist GPU providers and marketplaces and through bilateral contracts, at prices that differ by chip, region, contract length and how quickly the capacity is needed. The other is electricity. Data centers have become large enough to move regional load forecasts and wholesale prices, and the price of power in turn affects where new capacity is built and what it costs to run. Commodity traders will recognise the arrangement. Gas and power are linked by the spark spread, crude and refined products by the crack spread, and corn and ethanol by the crush spread.
Kalshi is building the compute leg in three stages.
- Prediction markets let traders take positions on compute prices, data-center growth and power demand before anyone has agreed on a spot price. Kalshi first listed GPU compute markets in March 2026, and published the first market-implied GPU forward curve in July 2026. Several million fully collateralized contracts have traded in the space already.
- Perpetual futures give exposure to the current price of compute without owning GPUs or rolling contracts. Kalshi already runs regulated perpetuals on crypto and on precious metals.
- Dated futures give exposure to particular months and years. These are the contracts AI companies, GPU operators, developers and lenders would use to hedge in the way commodity producers and consumers already do.
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