Data Center CapEx Forecast
Social Graph VC, a venture capital firm, just put out a primer on the computing market. Its call: data center capital expenditure will top $1 trillion in 2026. That is about 2x the combined spending of the four big hyperscale cloud providers in 2025. Jensen Huang goes even bigger. He says annual spending could hit $3-4 trillion by the end of the decade, then climb to $10 trillion by 2031.
AI Investment and Model Training Costs
The report says AI investment now makes up roughly 0.9% of global GDP, and that figure is expected to rise to about 1.4% by 2028. Training models like Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 uses less than 2 GW of power apiece and runs around $120 billion each. And each model generation can break even by itself. The losses at labs come from scaling the next generation up by 10x.
Compute Pricing and Funding Gap
There is no single price for compute. H100 rentals run at about $1.95 an hour on the open market, but $8-9 an hour in hyperscale clouds. Prices also swing hard, with hourly rates moving by as much as 137% over a year. By 2028, global data center spending is projected to reach $3 trillion. The shortfall against that is $1.5 trillion.
GPU Futures Products
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, or CME, is planning to list cash-settled H100 and B200 monthly lease futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) on October 5, 2026, if regulators sign off. Settlement will use the Silicon Data Index. And ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange, has announced GPU futures tied to the Ornn Index.