Architect Financial Technologies Inc. announced that its perpetual futures exchange, AX, will imminently launch the financial industry's first exchange-traded futures contracts based on compute, pending regulatory approval. In a partnership with compute index provider Ornn Data LLC ("Ornn"), AX will offer trading in perpetual futures linked to the costs of datacenter compute inputs to institutional customers.

Leveraging Ornn's first-in-kind indexes based on live transaction data, AX's compute futures contracts will track daily rental prices of GPUs, the processors that power AI model training and inference, as well as the prices of DRAM, the high-speed memory essential for compute performance. This path-breaking product offering meets growing demand from AI companies, datacenter operators, lenders, and hardware vendors to hedge against the new financial asset class's volatility and depreciation risk. AX will provide customers the ability to trade compute perpetual contracts on margin with the flexibility of funding positions with fiat USD or USD stablecoins.

Brett Harrison, Architect's Chief Executive Officer, commented on the news, "As capital expenditures for AI and AI-adjacent companies continue exponential growth, there is an urgent cross-industry need to establish standardized derivatives contracts and centralized order books for compute. We're fortunate to partner with Ornn, whose innovative and forward-looking index products are designed with foremost technical expertise, at this critical time in the market."

Kush Bavaria, Ornn's Chief Executive Officer, stated, "Compute is rapidly becoming the defining commodity of the AI era, yet until now there has been no transparent, tradeable benchmark for its price. Ornn's indices are built on real transaction data from live GPU markets, providing the foundation for price discovery that institutions require. We're excited to partner with Architect to bring these contracts to market and give the industry the tools to manage compute exposure with the same sophistication they apply to any other asset class."