Wall Street has a habit of building the financial plumbing before the water is even turned on. The OK Computer Power ETF just became the third fund to file for an ETF centered on compute futures, a product category that, as of right now, doesn’t actually trade anywhere.

Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart flagged the filing on May 21, 2026, noting it joins Roundhill’s Compute ETF (proposed ticker GPUX) and the ProShares AI Computing Power ETF in the queue. All three are designed to hold futures contracts tied to GPU computing costs. The catch: those futures contracts are still waiting on regulatory approval.

The futures market that started all of this

The foundation for this rush traces back to May 12, 2026, when CME Group and Silicon Data announced plans to launch the first-ever compute futures market. The contracts would be priced using Silicon Data’s daily GPU on-demand rental rate benchmarks, essentially creating an index that tracks what it costs to rent raw computing power on any given day.

The project has been labeled “first-in-class,” and it involves former DRW trader Carmen Li in developing the indices that will underpin these contracts. CME and Silicon Data expect to begin trading later in 2026, pending the green light from regulators.

Why Wall Street is treating GPU power like oil

Futures markets allow a company training a large language model to lock in GPU rental rates months in advance, hedging against a sudden price jump. A hedge fund could take the other side of that trade, betting that new supply from Nvidia, AMD, or custom silicon will push prices down.

The ETF wrappers being proposed by Roundhill, ProShares, and OK Computer Power would make this even more accessible. Instead of navigating futures markets directly, which require margin accounts and specialized knowledge, retail investors could buy shares of an ETF that holds those contracts. It’s the same playbook that turned oil futures into ticker symbols like USO and made gold exposure as simple as buying GLD.

The race to file first, and what it means for investors

Three applications in quick succession, all targeting a futures product that hasn’t launched, suggests firms are jockeying for first-mover advantage. Whoever gets approved and listed first will likely capture the bulk of early inflows, a dynamic that has played out repeatedly in the ETF space.

But there are real risks here that deserve attention. These are futures-based ETFs, which means they’ll face the same structural challenges that plague commodity ETFs. Rolling contracts from one expiration to the next can erode returns over time, a phenomenon known as contango drag. Investors in oil ETFs learned this lesson painfully during the 2020 price collapse, when front-month futures went negative but longer-dated contracts didn’t, causing massive tracking errors.

None of these ETFs can actually launch until the underlying futures receive approval and begin trading. If CME’s compute futures hit a regulatory snag or face delays, these ETF filings sit in limbo.