Compute Desk’s Indexes Are Now Regulated

LONDON & SAN FRANCISCO, 13 August 2026

Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into GPUs, which makes AI compute the fastest growing asset class in history. Until now it has been trading without the thing every serious market takes for granted: an independent, regulated price. General Index (GX) and Compute Desk have changed that. Together they have launched the first GPU compute benchmarks produced to the IOSCO and EU/UK Benchmark Regulation (BMR) standard, so buyers, sellers, lenders and investors finally have a price they can trade, hedge and finance against.

There are three benchmarks, all published every day. Hopper and Blackwell each price a whole family of NVIDIA chips. H100prices the single most traded chip on its own. They are the first Compute Desk indices produced to a formal regulatory standard, which is what sets them apart from the pricing this market has relied on so far.

Prices in this market were moving down at an expected rate, but now they are trending upwards because of demand.  Renting an NVIDIA H100 cost $4.34 an hour in April 2024, $2.67 August 2025, $1.95 Jan 2026; today it is around $2.75.  In a market where a single training run can cost millions, keeping track of where the price stands is one of the most important factors. When prices swing, a trusted and independent benchmark stops being optional.

Each index sets one price every US business day at 4:30pm New York time, quoted in US dollars per GPU per hour. Those prices come from live rental quotes and completed transactions across the major GPU cloud marketplaces.

The division of labor is simple. Compute Desk runs the deal infrastructure that GPU rentals flow through, so it sees real transactions every day - the core inputs to the benchmark calculations. General Index then calculates and publishes the prices and maintains regulatory oversight. GX is regulated by the FCA and aligned with IOSCO, and it runs the same methodology framework it already uses across more than 6,000 energy and commodity benchmarks.

The price histories go back well before this launch. Hopper and H100 reach back to early 2024, and Blackwell to April 2025. All three, with their full histories, are available from day one on GX Go and directly inside the Compute Desk platform, where the market already prices, trades and hedges compute.

Because the benchmarks are built to the same standard as the world's energy and commodity prices, institutions can actually put them to work. That means hedging exposure to compute costs, financing GPU fleets and marking them to market, and building the structured products that let capital treat compute as an asset class in its own right.

"GPU compute is becoming as important to price properly as oil or power, and right now the market has no reliable reference point. Compute Desk sees the real deals happening in this market every day; combining that with our benchmark methodology gives the industry a price it can trust, published to the same standard as our energy and commodity benchmarks."

- Neil Bradford, CEO and Founder, General Index

"We built Compute Desk on the deals we saw moving through GPU cloud marketplaces every day, and it was clear early on that this market needed a proper price. Partnering with General Index lets us turn that data into an independent benchmark, overseen by an IOSCO aligned and regulated benchmark administrator, that buyers and sellers of GPU compute can actually rely on."

- Andrawes Bahou, CEO and Founder, Compute Desk

About General Index

General Index (GX) delivers prices based on data, not journalism. Its benchmarks are calculated algorithmically from thousands of live and executed transactions, using consistent methodologies and a compliant approach aligned with IOSCO and EU/UK Benchmark Regulation requirements. GX produces thousands of daily prices across energy and, with the launch of its GPU benchmarks, compute markets. GX Benchmarks Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Index Limited, is regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA Registration number 933348).  

About Compute Desk

Compute Desk builds financial infrastructure to price, trade and hedge compute as an asset class. It runs GPU deal infrastructure across the major cloud marketplaces, which gives it a live view of GPU rental transactions as they happen, from whole Hopper and Blackwell families down to individual GPUs. It also makes the new benchmarks available directly inside its platform.