Silicon Data vs Opengrid: a GPU price index vs a market you can buy in

If you follow GPU pricing, you have probably come across Silicon Data. It publishes GPU rental price indices, and those indices are the basis for CME's H100 and B200 rental futures. This post covers what Silicon Data does well, where it stops, and how Opengrid fits next to it: as a place to act on the price, not only read it.

Up front: Opengrid is pre-launch. The market view ships first and the routing API is in development. Where this post describes Opengrid, it describes what we are building, not something you can sign up for and use today.

What Silicon Data does

Silicon Data builds GPU rental price indices. It raised a $30.5M Series A with backing from CME Ventures, DRW and Jump, and its indices underpin the H100 and B200 rental futures CME lists from 5 October 2026.

That is important work. A commodity needs a trusted reference price before it can be traded, and GPU compute has never had one. Silicon Data's index also makes market moves visible. Its H100 rental index went from $2.00 to $2.20 an hour over four weeks, December 2025 to January 2026, a 10% move that most buyers would never have noticed on their own.

Where Silicon Data stops

Silicon Data publishes prices. It does not place workloads. Three things follow from that:

• You can read the price, but you can't buy at it. An index tells you what an H100 hour costs across the market. To actually rent one, you still go to a provider, open an account, sign a contract and learn its API.
• An index is an average, and your job isn't. A reference price is built for benchmarking and settling contracts. Your job needs a specific GPU type, count, region and deadline, and the right answer for that request can be far from the average.
• No reliability data. Price is one input. Whether a provider actually delivers is another, and that only shows up when real jobs run.

None of that is a knock on Silicon Data. It is building the reference price for a new commodity, and it does that well. It just isn't built to run your job.

How Opengrid is different

Opengrid sits on both sides of the same line: it shows the market and it acts on it. The plan is built in three layers, in order:

1. See the market (now): pricing, availability, capacity and regions across providers in a single live view.
2. Route the workload (next): describe the job once and Opengrid places it with whichever provider wins on price, availability, region and reliability.
3. Trade compute (later): real routed jobs produce real transaction prices, a live price for every GPU and region.

With routing, a price becomes a placement:

POST /v1/route · 8× H100 · US · < $2.50/hr · done within 12 hours

Illustrative request. The routing API is in development.

The third layer is where the two approaches meet. An index measures prices from the outside. Routed jobs produce prices from the inside: what buyers actually paid, for a specific GPU, in a specific region, on a specific day. That is also the kind of data reliability scores are built from.

Silicon Data vs Opengrid at a glance

	Silicon Data	Opengrid
Status	Live	Pre-launch. Market view first, routing API in development
What it produces	GPU rental price indices	A live market view, then routing
Fair-price benchmark	Yes	Yes, from the live market view
Buy compute in one place	No	Yes
Routes by workload	No	Yes, that is the core product
Reliability data on providers	No	Planned, from real routed jobs
Basis for exchange futures	Yes, CME H100 and B200 rental futures	No. The later goal is prices from real routed jobs

Which should you use?

Use Silicon Data if you need a trusted reference price for GPU compute: to benchmark a contract, report on the market, or trade the CME futures built on its indices.

Join the Opengrid waitlist if you are a buyer who wants to act on the price. That means seeing live prices and availability across providers, then describing a job and having it placed on the best option, with one bill whichever provider runs it. The two aren't mutually exclusive: an index tells you where the market is, and routing gets your job onto the right side of it.

For more on the futures side, read CME's GPU futures explained, or see how GPU rental prices moved through 2025 and 2026.