The price the machine economy will settle on
A GPU-hour is what it costs to rent one AI accelerator for an hour — the raw fuel of everything agents do. On 2026-10-05 the CME lists futures that let people hedge that price; they cash-settle on the monthly average of a daily rental index. The daily levels are published openly and kept by nobody — two web-archive captures exist, and the last independent price tracker went dark on 2026-04-19. So we mirror the settlement inputs, dated and hashed: hold the dailies and anyone can recompute a settlement and check the exchange's number.
Compute is the grain of the machine economy — and SGS was founded in 1878 verifying grain shipments. reported = the index publishers' own numbers · observed = prices we recorded ourselves.
One hour of one chip, priced reported
An H100 is $2.74 from a neo-cloud and $7.20 from a hyperscaler — 2.6× for the identical chip-hour. A cash-settled future has to choose one of them; it chooses the index. That is why an index exists at all, and why it matters who checks it. Rent one H100 for a full day and it's about $66; a rack for a month runs into six figures. (as of Aug 13, 2026)
The only price history anyone holds observed
Before the index, one tracker recorded provider list-prices. It froze on 2026-04-19. This is its H100 25th-percentile rate, Feb–Apr 2026 — with the five-week hole where it stopped publishing left exactly as it is. We hold it because it is the only pre-financialization record that exists; we recorded it before it could vanish too.
An independent second reading reported
GPUAlpha publishes its own composite compute index — not a mirror of the settlement index. Two instruments on different machinery: where they stop agreeing, one is wrong.