Intelligence Just Became an Asset Class

When something gets a futures market, you know it has become a commodity. That just happened to thought itself.

TLDR: This week the Shanghai Futures Exchange, the floor that trades copper, steel, and gold, confirmed it's in the early stages of designing futures contracts on AI tokens. CME Group and Silicon Data are launching a compute futures market, pending regulatory review, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has said “a new asset class will be buying futures of compute”. Translation: The cost of thinking will increasingly move like the price of jet fuel: volatile, periodically rationed, and repriced on a schedule you don’t control. Route 100% of your work through that market and you're exposed. The winners will be the ones who run cognition like a portfolio: own what you need, rent what you can afford, and never end up at the market's mercy. Start building that muscle now.

There is a specific moment when a resource stops being a product and becomes a commodity.

Wheat was just food until there was a wheat futures pit. Oil was just a fuel until there was a crude contract. Electricity was just a utility bill until power started trading on an exchange. In every case, the same thing happened the moment the futures market opened: the resource stopped belonging to the people who consumed it and started belonging to the people who priced it.

That line just got crossed for intelligence. And almost nobody looked up.

I wrote yesterday that companies drowning in AI bills need to move from measuring usage to measuring outcomes. But while we were all staring at the bill, something structurally larger happened underneath the argument. The bill itself became tradeable.

WHAT SHANGHAI IS BUILDING

The Shanghai Futures Exchange is the hub where China trades its hard commodities i.e., the metals and materials that built the physical economy. This week, sources confirmed it is in the early stages of designing futures contracts for AI tokens: the unit of information an AI model processes, the thing your enterprise bill is now denominated in.

Futures on the thought the machines produce.

The U.S. is moving in parallel but one layer lower. The CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange, which are two of the largest derivatives venues in the world, are preparing GPU compute futures, contracts tied to the cost of renting the machines.

America is pricing the engine. China is pricing what comes out of the engine.

By writing contracts on tokens rather than chips, China is making a bet that the durable, tradeable scarcity of the AI era will be cognition.

AND the demand for exactly this kind of instrument is being voiced at the very top of global finance. The CEO of BlackRock told a conference this month that surging token demand could spawn an entirely new asset class in compute futures.

THE 1400X MARKET MAKER

Markets form around volatile, scarce, things. Things that are growing exponentially, where arbitrage opportunities are high, because that’s where the need to hedge lives.

Look at the demand curve. China’s daily token consumption has risen 1400X since the start of 2024, to more than 140 trillion tokens a day. More than thousand times, in two years.

Now look at the supply side. Compute shortages have already forced Chinese AI models to ration access to users. The fuel is running short before the market to trade it has even opened.

Explosive demand, constrained supply, wild price volatility, and a resource that every serious enterprise now depends on to function. There has virtually never been a commodity with those four properties that didn’t end up with a futures market. The only surprising thing about token futures is that they took until 2026 to appear.

INTELLIGENCE GETS SURGE PRICING

Shanghai is building token‑based futures contracts so tokens can trade. So what?

An exchange only exists for things whose price moves. The moment intelligence trades on a market, the cost of thinking stops behaving like a flat monthly subscription and starts behaving like the price of jet fuel: it spikes, it gets rationed, it gets repriced against you, on a schedule someone else controls. And the instant that’s true, everyone who depends on that input is exposed to it, whether they ever look at a futures screen or not.

If you want to see what that exposure looks like on the ground? Look at Max Johnson.

Max runs a small UK startup that helps businesses adopt AI. A year ago, he and his two cofounders could open a single chat in the morning and work in it all day, producing the output of a thirty-person company with three people. Then the usage caps tightened. Now he can sometimes burn his entire daily allowance two prompts into a fresh chat. When all three founders hit the wall at once, the company simply stops. They lose half an hour, an hour, waiting for the meter to reset before they can think at full capacity again.

The Shanghai exchange and the stall at Max’s startup are the same story seen from opposite ends. A market got built around cognition and the exposure to that market landed squarely on the smallest player in it. The trading desk and the panicked founder are connected by a single wire, and that wire is now strung through every business that runs on AI. Including, soon, yours.

COGNITIVE LEVERAGE BEATS COGNITIVE SURRENDER

This is the part worth getting right.

The first wrong answer is surrender: route 100% of your thinking through someone else’s market and hope the price stays kind. It feels efficient right up to the morning it throttles you mid-sprint.

The second wrong answer is the overcorrection: try to own everything, build it all in-house, escape the market entirely. You can’t afford that, and you shouldn’t want to. The frontier models are genuinely extraordinary and getting better by the month. Cutting yourself off from them to feel independent is just a more expensive way to fall behind.

The right answer is the one every operator who has ever survived a volatile input cost already knows: you run a portfolio. Cognition on demand is a resource now, and like any resource it comes in flavors: frontier and local, expensive and cheap, rented and owned, each with its own price and its own terms. The move is to allocate deliberately across all of them.

Own what you absolutely need, rent what you can afford to be exposed on, and structure the whole thing so the market works FOR you.

That is cognitive leverage, start building that muscle now. Until next time, Ram — 

Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

—

A Message From Ram:

My mission is to illuminate the path toward humanity's exponential future. If you're a leader, innovator, or changemaker passionate about leveraging breakthrough technologies to create unprecedented positive impact, you're in the right place. If you know others who share this vision, please share these insights. Together, we can accelerate the trajectory of human progress.

Disclaimer:

Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."

All views expressed on "Substrate" and across all digital channels and social media platforms are strictly personal opinions and do not represent the official positions of any organizations or entities I am affiliated with, past or present. The content shared is for informational and inspirational purposes only. These perspectives are my own and should not be construed as professional, legal, financial, technical, or strategic advice. Any decisions made based on this information are solely the responsibility of the reader.

While I strive to ensure accuracy and timeliness in all communications, the rapid pace of technological change means that some information may become outdated. I encourage readers to conduct their own due diligence and seek appropriate professional advice for their specific circumstances.