The hard part of compute futures will always be when somebody needs the compute at the other end.

The contracts announced so far are cash-settled. They can hedge the reference price of a B300 or H100 hour without anyone having to deliver a cluster.

The Nebius example shows why physical delivery is harder. Investor analysis of its B300 deals puts longer-term capacity around $4.25 per GPU-hour and near-term capacity above $9. The same chip can cost more than twice as much. The difference is obviously contract length and the value of contiguous clusters.

At the end of the day a buyer needs more than B300 hours. They need a specific number of GPUs in the same place, connected with the right networking, available for the right period, in the right geography and with the required uptime and software.

A cash index can average across those differences, but a marketplace delivering the compute has to decide which capacity is genuinely interchangeable.

Narrow delivery specifications fragment liquidity across thousands of products. Broad specifications can leave the buyer with compute that technically matches the contract but cannot run the intended workload.