Sino-US AI Derivatives Race: Shanghai Futures Exchange to Launch Token Futures

According to DataInsight Beating monitoring, the Shanghai Futures Exchange is planning to launch futures contracts for the AI Token (the smallest unit of information processed by an artificial intelligence model), marking a further escalation in the competition between China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence and financial derivatives. Unlike the GPU computing power leasing futures being prepared by the CME and ICE in the United States, the Shanghai Futures Exchange's futures contracts are directly linked to Token consumption used for AI service pricing, aiming to provide a new financial instrument for hedging computing power and inference costs throughout the entire AI industry chain.

The research design of the Token futures aims to address China's rapidly expanding computing power and Token consumption demand. Official data shows that since early 2024, China's daily Token usage has increased by 1000 times, exceeding 140 trillion by the end of March 2026. At the same time, the shortage of computing power has recently intensified, forcing several domestic large model manufacturers to implement user access quota controls. In order to accelerate the construction of the computing power spot and derivatives markets, the official commodity index company released multiple computing power indices in December 2025 as the underlying reference for the futures contracts.

Academia and financial experts point out that the early introduction of Token futures is crucial for China to maintain financial pricing power in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence competition. Shao Yilei, Dean of the Shanghai AI Finance Institute at East China Normal University, emphasized that China and the United States are the only two countries in the world with large-scale AI production capabilities, and controlling Token pricing will play a critical role in bilateral competition. Although some brokerages predict that it will take 3 to 5 years for China's computing power futures to be launched and face realistic obstacles such as market fragmentation, the early preparation for Token futures has already demonstrated China's clear ambition to build a sovereign AI financial ecosystem to the outside world.