The Trump administration reportedly shut down part of Kalshi’s effort to establish a futures market for AI compute.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Semafor reported on Tuesday that the U.S. Commerce Department ordered Kalshi last month to take down a product tracking the future price of AI compute.
According to Semafor, Commerce officials cited national security concerns when they told Kalshi to remove what the company called its compute forward curves.
Kalshi launched the forward curves in July for Nvidia’s B200, H200, and A100 chips. The charts were designed to serve as benchmarks showing the market’s implied future price for renting one hour of a particular GPU.
The curves themselves were not tradable. Instead, they were built using data from Kalshi’s underlying markets on weekly and monthly GPU rental prices.
Kalshi pitched the benchmarks as a reference for neoclouds, data centers, hyperscalers, and AI labs negotiating compute deals. Companies could also use the underlying markets to hedge against future changes in compute prices, similar to how companies and traders already use commodity futures to manage the risk of rising or falling oil prices.
“Compute is the new oil. Like every commodity before it, it needs a real derivatives market,” said Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour in a press release at the time. “Demand for AI is only going to increase. Kalshi intends to be the exchange where all future buyers and sellers manage their risk.”
Semafor reported that Kalshi quietly complied with Commerce’s request, although many of the underlying markets that allow users to trade on future compute prices remain open.
It’s not entirely clear why the Commerce Department is worried about the benchmarks. But market participants told Semafor that one concern is that the thinly traded compute market could be manipulated to make it look like prices for older chips are falling, potentially affecting AI stocks and the industry overall.
Semafor separately reported that the Commerce Department also pushed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to freeze approval of new compute derivatives contracts for 60 days.
Around the same time, the CFTC announced in August that it was opening a 60-day public comment period on compute derivatives.
“America cannot win the AI race without a robust derivatives market for compute,” said CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig. “Just as American markets helped establish the gold standard for trading the commodities that powered the industrial economy, we will do the same for the commodity that will power the intelligence economy. This request for comment is the first step toward establishing clear rules of the road for American compute markets.”
Kalshi declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment. However, a department spokesperson told Semafor that the story was false and that Commerce “has never once asked Kalshi to take down this market or any other markets.”
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