Silicon Data chief executive Carmen Li says the company’s GPU forward curve has turned upward this year, in a video clip Fireside Alpha posted on X on 25 October 2026. “Last year was complete downward sloping curve,” Li said, meaning “the longer term contract you signed, the cheaper.” This year, “the whole curve shift up and became contango.” Li said the curve shows that “a market consensus view is the price could go up in the future, next 36 months.”
Silicon Data launched the curve on 20 April 2026, describing it as term-structure pricing and implied forward rates for GPU rentals “across a 36 month horizon.” Its spot indices cover Nvidia’s A100, H100 and B200, according to a 1 May blog post by Li.
Business Pill · MARGIN SQUEEZE
A short explainer of a margin squeeze: when what you pay rises and what you can charge falls. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about Silicon Data, its forward curve or GPU rental prices.
The key insight: As we read it, the new element is the shape of the curve, not the spot price: Li says Silicon Data’s GPU forward curve sloped down last year and became contango this year, so longer rental contracts no longer bring the discount they did, while the H100 spot index rose from $2.00 in December 2025 to $2.88 on 24 October 2026.
Update (26 Oct): a buyer describes the queue. Palo Alto Networks chief executive Nikesh Arora said on the All-In podcast, published on 23 October, that “compute is highly dear” and that he is “a taker of terms, not a dictator of terms.” Asked whether Palo Alto might build its own data centres, he said: “you talk to Jensen, he can’t give you chips till 2028,” and called building his own “kind of an empty threat” (All-In, about 11:50).
Arora said Palo Alto runs only 10 to 20 megawatts of inference and expects to rent bare metal from a hyperscaler or a smaller provider. This is his account of what he hears from Nvidia, not a statement by Nvidia, and the quotes come from the episode’s auto-generated transcript.
In the clip, Li walked through a chart of the curve. “The horizontal line is the duration, and the dollar amount is the Y axis,” Li said. The yellow line, last year’s curve, sloped down. The red line, this year’s, sloped up: “starting early this year, the whole curve shift up and became contango.”
Li explained what that means for buyers: it translates “to people not getting enough discount for longer term contract,” which “implies that people assume the price going to rise down the line.” Li said the curve “keeps shifting up, got flattened,” so people “are now either get penalized or get, you know, awarded by signing long term contract.”
Li said the data is “reserved contract we observe,” and that the implied forward rates are “calculated based on our term structure” because “we don’t have a future trading.” Li said Silicon Data uses “similar methodology as Treasury futures curve.” The post does not say where or when the clip was recorded, and the quotations are from the post’s transcript.
Silicon Data’s H100 neo-cloud rental index rose from $2.00 per GPU-hour on 9 December 2025 to $2.88 on 24 October 2026; the 44% rise is our arithmetic (Silicon Data index page and blog posts, as reported in our 24 Oct piece). Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li says the company’s forward curve turned to contango this year.
What Was Posted on X
Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li says the GPU forward curve has flipped to contango, so the market expects compute prices to keep rising over the next 36 months
“So, the yellow line was last year, right The horizontal line is the duration, and the dollar amount is the Y axis. So, last year was complete downward sloping curve for the yellow line, right Meaning the longer term contract you signed, the cheaper, you know, was per GPU per hour.”
“And this year, starting early this year, the whole curve shift up and became contango. If you see the red line, right?”
“So, translate to people not getting enough discount for longer term contract. Implies that people assume the price going to rise down the line.”
“And now you see the price, the whole curve keeps shifting up, got flattened, right So, meaning people are now either get penalized or get, you know, awarded by signing long term contract.”
“This is reserved contract we observe. And if you look at implied forward rates, this is the implied forward rates, right Because we don’t have a future trading. So, this is calculated based on our term structure. And we use similar methodology as Treasury futures curve.”
“So, you can see a market consensus view is the price could go up in the future, next 36 months.”
Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha) posted a video clip of Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li on 25 October 2026, with a transcript. In it, Li says the curve sloped down last year and “became contango” this year, and that “a market consensus view is the price could go up in the future, next 36 months.” This piece quotes Li from that transcript.
Another day, another round of on-demand GPU rental indices surging across the board and reaching ATHs. Even the A100 index, which recently saw some softness, seems to be inflecting a little.
Silicon Data (@silicondata) posted on 23 October 2026 that on-demand GPU rental indices were “surging across the board and reaching ATHs,” and that the A100 index, which “recently saw some softness,” “seems to be inflecting a little.” This piece cites it for the spot prices under the curve.
How the Curve Works
Silicon Data’s 20 April release says the curve derives two things from real-world GPU rental data: “Term structure rates — the cost of locking in GPU capacity over specific time horizons” and “Implied forward rates — market expectations for future GPU on-demand rental price.” The release said early data suggested long-term contracts “are not meaningfully discounted relative to on-demand pricing, and in some cases trade at a premium.”
Li’s 1 May post explains the shapes. “Upward sloping (contango) — the market expects rates to rise,” it says, while “Downward sloping (backwardation) — the market expects rates to fall.” The post adds that the forward rate “is not a forecast in the editorial sense” but “the mathematical consequence of the current term structure.”
Curve shape
What Silicon Data says it means
When, per Li
Downward sloping (backwardation)
the market expects rates to fall
Last year
Upward sloping (contango)
the market expects rates to rise
This year, from early in the year
Sources: Carmen Li’s blog post, 1 May 2026; Li in a video clip posted by Fireside Alpha on X, 25 Oct 2026.
The Spot Prices Underneath
The spot indices have been climbing too. On 23 October Silicon Data posted on X: “Another day, another round of on-demand GPU rental indices surging across the board and reaching ATHs.” Our H100 piece reported the H100 neo-cloud index at $2.88 per GPU-hour on 24 October, against $2.00 on 9 December 2025. Our crunch spread piece reported Silicon Data’s B300 index up 51.9% from 31 May to 22 October.
The Futures Plan
CME Group and Silicon Data said on 12 May that they would launch a compute futures market “later this year, pending regulatory review,” with products “based on Silicon Data’s indices,” Markets Media reported. The same release describes Silicon Data as “backed by global trading firm DRW.” Li said in the clip that the forward rates are calculated “because we don’t have a future trading.”
Where It Meets Our Coverage
DRW founder Don Wilson called the margin between rented GPU-hours and the tokens sold from them the crunch spread, as reported in our crunch spread piece. Our DeepSeek piece reported DeepSeek’s figure of US$38 per GPU-hour for one cluster at off-peak prices. Those pieces cover spot rents and token revenue; this one covers what term contracts imply.
The Structural Read
As we read it, Li describes a change in what term buys: last year “the longer term contract you signed, the cheaper,” and this year “people not getting enough discount for longer term contract.”
As we read it, Silicon Data’s April release had already pointed this way: long-term contracts “are not meaningfully discounted relative to on-demand pricing, and in some cases trade at a premium.”
As we read it, the curve is a model, not a market yet: Li said the forward rates are calculated “because we don’t have a future trading,” and CME’s compute futures were announced “pending regulatory review.”
Carmen Li, Silicon Data CEO, video clip posted by Fireside Alpha, 25 October 2026
“a market consensus view is the price could go up in the future, next 36 months”
Three Implications
FOR GPU BUYERS Li said people “are now either get penalized or get, you know, awarded by signing long term contract,” depending on where prices go.
FOR LENDERS Li’s May post describes a lender whose revenuemodel depends on expected rental rates “12, 24, and 36 months out.”
FOR TRADERS CME Group and Silicon Data said on 12 May they would launch compute futures “based on Silicon Data’s indices,” pending regulatory review.
The framework puts it this way: the token “is simultaneously the unit of cognition the model produces, the unit of compute the data center serves, the unit of price the lab charges, and the unit of value the enterprise extracts.”
As we read it, the forward curve prices the second of those roles over time: the compute the data center serves, rented by the hour, three years out. The framework was published in May 2026 and does not discuss Silicon Data’s curve.
What Is Not Established
Li gave no dollar figures for the curve in the clip, and we did not see the chart Li described or its date. The upward slope is Li’s description of Silicon Data’s own model, built from reserved contracts it observes, not from traded futures. Li’s blog post says the forward rate is not a forecast. We did not confirm whether the CME contracts have launched. We did not contact Silicon Data, CME Group or Fireside Alpha.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
Execution Fault Lines, Concentrated Demand, and Geopolitical Firewalls
This week’s issue: the AI build is not short of demand for its parts. It is short of cheap money, and its end revenue rests on a narrow base of large, often venture-funded buyers.
Li says Silicon Data’s GPU forward curve went from sloping down last year to contango this year, so longer GPU rental contracts no longer come with the discount they used to. In Li’s words, “a market consensus view is the price could go up in the future, next 36 months.” The H100 spot index rose from $2.00 in December 2025 to $2.88 on 24 October 2026.
A note on sourcing. Carmen Li is quoted from the transcript in Fireside Alpha’s X post of 25 October 2026; we did not see the full recording or the chart described. Silicon Data’s release, blog post and X post, and the Markets Media report of the CME release, were read on 25 October 2026. We did not contact the people or companies named.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
