Injective has launched a perpetual-futures market tied to a new index of artificial-intelligence computing costs. The Super Intelligence Compute Index, or SICI, combines rental prices for five Nvidia graphics processors and is now live on Injective mainnet. The product gives traders synthetic exposure to changes in GPU rental rates rather than ownership of chips, cloud capacity or Nvidia shares. Injective says positions use USDC as margin and may be leveraged up to 10 times.

Five GPU rental markets become one benchmark

The index assigns 40% to the Nvidia H100 SXM 80GB, 25% to the B200, 15% to the H200, 10% to the A100 SXM 80GB and 10% to the consumer-focused RTX 4090. That makes the H100 the largest driver while still capturing newer Blackwell hardware, high-memory accelerators and lower-cost inference equipment. Each component was rebased to 100 at the July 22, 2026 daily fixing before the fixed weights were applied.

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LO:TECH smooths fragmented marketplace prices

Injective says LO:TECH builds the benchmark from U.S.-dollar prices per GPU-hour collected across compute marketplaces. On-demand and spot listings are pooled, each marketplace counts once for a chip, and observations pass validation and outlier controls. The five normalized series are combined, then reported as a trailing seven-day average. The index is struck every hour in UTC, with the 19:00 UTC reading serving as its daily fixing. That smoothing can reduce the effect of a brief outlier, but it also means SICI is not an instantaneous quote for renting any specific machine from a particular provider.

A perpetual contract is not a compute booking

The market is a cash-margined derivative without an expiry date. A trader can take a long or short view on the published index, while the perpetual structure uses recurring funding mechanics to keep its price aligned with the reference benchmark. Holding the contract does not reserve GPU hours, deliver hardware or guarantee access to cloud infrastructure. The economic exposure can therefore diverge from the actual price a developer negotiates for a specific location, service level, contract length or machine configuration.

The hedge case comes with basis and leverage risk

AI developers that rent large amounts of compute may want protection against rising market rates, while infrastructure providers may want to offset the risk of falling rental revenue. SICI offers a broad signal that could support those goals, but its usefulness depends on liquidity and correlation with each user's real costs. The fixed basket, seven-day average and marketplace inputs can produce basis risk when a company's own exposure is concentrated in one chip or supplier. Up to 10x leverage also means relatively small index moves can rapidly erode margin and trigger liquidation.

Injective expands beyond its single-chip contract

The launch extends Injective's August 2025 H100 rental-price market, which was built with Squaretower, from one model to a five-chip basket. Independent reporting from Cointelegraph confirmed the weights, hourly update schedule, USDC margin and 10x leverage ceiling. The development is part of a broader effort to turn AI infrastructure prices into tradable benchmarks, but adoption is not yet established. Injective did not disclose opening volume, market depth, participating hedgers or evidence that compute buyers are using SICI to offset operating costs. Those measures will be more informative than the launch alone. For now, the verified change is narrower: an onchain perpetual referencing a diversified GPU-rental index is live, while its practical value as a hedge remains to be demonstrated.

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