Key Takeaways
- CME Group CEO Terry Duffy said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that the GPU market will be “multiples of the size of crypto by 2030.”
- GPU futures, which CME wants to list but regulators are holding back, would let chip buyers hedge rental prices and borrow more cheaply.
- CoreWeave’s total debt rose from $2 billion at the end of 2023 to $29.8 billion at the end of 2025, and its bonds due 2032 yield close to 15%.
- Cheaper financing for GPU buyers would support the demand behind Nvidia’s revenue estimates, though a futures market would also put a public price on any fall in rental rates.
Some people still aren’t sure GPUs count as an asset class. CME Group (CME) CEO Terry Duffy isn’t one of them.
On Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Duffy said the GPU market is already over a trillion dollars. By his count, crypto, an asset class nobody argues about anymore, is less than $3 trillion.
And he thinks GPUs are just getting started:
“The GPU market will be multiples of the size of crypto by 2030.”
If he’s right, that’s a big deal for anyone borrowing to buy AI chips.
Duffy wants CME to list GPU futures, but the administration is holding them back, citing national security. His take: “This makes no sense to me why they’re holding these products back.”
The money is already there
Duffy said DRW founder Don Wilson brought him the idea. On the previous day’s episode, Wilson took on the worry that GPUs are too varied to trade as one market:
“the amount of money going into just H100s or just B200s is large enough to support a single futures market.”
Nvidia (NVDA), which makes both chips, backs him up. Its revenue jumped from $131 billion in the year ended January 2025 to $216 billion in the year ended January 2026, and analysts expect about $903 billion by the year ending January 2029…
Not all of that is H100s and B200s. But that’s a lot of chips someone has to pay for…
Borrowed money is the pressure point
…and plenty of buyers are paying with debt. Look at CoreWeave (CRWV): its total debt went from $2 billion at the end of 2023 to $29.8 billion at the end of 2025, nearly 15x in two years.
Its bond investors are nervous: CoreWeave’s 9.625% notes due 2032 yield close to 15%.
Wilson explained why. A neocloud with the most creditworthy customers is fine. But “if you’re selling on-demand compute, or you’re selling to less credit-worthy entities, then your cost of capital is just going to be higher.”
The root of it is what the chips will be worth later. As Wilson put it, “nobody knows what the value of a B200 will be four years from now, five years from now.”
Futures could make GPUs cheaper to finance
Wilson’s fix: a neocloud buys the GPUs and sells a strip of GPU futures to lock in what those hours will earn. Then it sells on-demand compute, or six-month contracts to riskier customers who pay a big chunk up front. The market will reward companies that do that, he said, and “their cost of capital is going to be much lower.”
For a company whose bonds yield close to 15%, that would matter a lot. And cheaper money for GPU buyers means more buyers who can afford Nvidia’s chips.
Plus: Wilson expects futures on tokens, the chips’ output, eventually too. On X, he shared DRW’s name for the margin between tokens and GPUs: the “crunch spread,” after oil’s crack spread. (Commodity traders do love a spread.) With futures on both, he wrote, buyers could “trade—and hedge—the crunch,” locking in a margin on top of a rental price.
Price discovery cuts both ways
A liquid futures market would also put a public price on GPU rental rates every day, and that price can fall. Wilson himself noted that H100 on-demand prices kept sliding until around Thanksgiving last year, when Anthropic’s newest model set off a rush of demand for inference. If rates slide again, lenders will see exactly how much the chips backing their loans have lost.
My take: GPU futures would be a clear win for CoreWeave and the other neoclouds, and so for Nvidia. Lenders already charge for not knowing what a B200 will be worth later. A hedge that takes some of that risk off the table should make the money cheaper.
Whether GPUs end up multiples of crypto by 2030 depends on how you measure the market. But Nvidia’s estimates alone suggest there’s more than enough money for real futures trading.
Of course, none of this happens until regulators let CME list the contracts. And even then, Wilson says they’d go out three years at first. That’s short of the four or five years he says nobody can price yet.
So what is Nvidia stock actually worth?
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR’s valuation model and see what Nvidia could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It’s free to use.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
