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RESEARCH | ANALYSIS | INSIGHT 28 July 2026

A futures market for AI computing power

When the world’s largest asset manager predicts a futures market for computing power and an exchange launches one within a week, the signal seems clear: compute has become the AI era’s scarce commodity. Yet the same industry straining against that shortage is engineering its way out of it, targeting cost reductions of up to two orders of magnitude. New asset classes typically follow a pattern: a critical resource becomes scarce, demand rises, and financial markets build instruments to manage that scarcity, as with oil futures, then carbon credits. In 2026, the same dynamic is taking shape around AI computing power, as demand for AI infrastructure continues to outpace supply.

Charles-Henry Monchau, CFA, CAIA, CMT Hugo Morel Chief Investment Officer Syz Research Lab Team

Benjamin Roth Syz Research Lab Team

1. The shortage is real, not just one CEO’s view At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, Black- demand. BlackRock is backing that view with capital, Rock CEO Larry Fink argued that demand for compute had including a ~$40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers grown so intense that “a new asset class will be buying and a $10.7 billion deal for power producer AES. Brookfield futures of compute,” citing shortages in capacity, chips CEO Bruce Flatt echoed the scale of the shift, describing a and memory across the US. He dismissed AI bubble con- decade-long “rewiring of the global economy.” cerns, pointing instead to supply shortages outpacing

BlackRock AI & Data Acquisitions (2024–2026) Announced Target Sector Value (USD) Date Nov 2024 CoreWeave (CRWV US) AI cloud infrastructure / GPU data centers $650M Large-scale AI/data center infrastructure ~$12B Dec 2024 HPS Investment Partners consortium (all-stock) Oct 2025 Aligned Data Centers Data Centers / Digital Infrastructure $40B Feb 2026 Unnamed Target Mega AI/data center infrastructure deal $122B Feb 2026 Unnamed Target Digital infrastructure consortium $30B Mar 2026 AES Corp. Power Generation for AI Data Centers $10.7B Jul 2025 Unnamed Target (Talen Energy deal) Power/data center infrastructure (TLN US) $2.33B

Ground-level research corroborates this. A June 2026 is driven by demand concentration: the top 5% of enter- Silicon Valley trip by tech-equity investors Brook Dane prise users consume roughly three times the tokens of the and Sung Cho found a compute-constrained environment median company, with inference now overtaking training extending beyond GPUs to ASICs and memory chips, in as the dominant volume driver. what Cho called an unprecedented up-cycle. The strain

This structural mismatch is what makes the shortage ing Dane’s view that valuations across the supply chain investable: if supply can’t meet demand within a year, remain “very attractive.” capex must stretch over three to five years, support-

F O C U S | 28 July 2026 Syz Private Banking | Please refer to the complete disclaimer on p.4 2/4