The Race to Offer Compute Futures to Masses Has Already Started

Wall Street is racing to turn computing power into a tradable commodity with the first ETFs being filed even before the futures contracts they would track have started to trade.

Roundhill Investments, the boutique firm behind the fastest-growing exchange-traded fund in history, has submitted paperwork with regulators for the Roundhill Compute ETF under the ticker GPUX. The actively managed ETF would hold futures contracts pegged to the price of computing power. Per the prospectus, this includes cloud computing, high-performance computing and storage required to run calculations, process data and train artificial intelligence and machine-learning models.

Last week, paperwork for the ...