Silicon Data Raises $30.5 Million Series A to Build the Independent Benchmark Layer for the AI Compute Economy

Funding led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund will expand the pricing and performance benchmarks behind CME Group's planned GPU futures market

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Silicon Data, the independent benchmark and verification layer for the compute economy, today announced a $30.5 million initial closing of its Series A, led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with additional investment from CME Group, DRW, F-Prime, Samsung, VanEck, Further, Jump, Tectonic and Wintermute. Breed, Hack, Blank VC, Sancus Ventures and SoGal Ventures also participated.

The Series A will fund expansion across four areas: benchmark pricing, performance measurement through SiliconMark, institutional market and alternative data, and risk infrastructure for derivatives, insurance and credit markets.

The raise comes as CME Group prepares to use Silicon Data benchmarks as the reference price for its planned cash-settled GPU futures market (pending regulatory approval),- a regulated instrument that will allow market participants to manage changes in GPU rental prices against a published, daily benchmark.

“Compute is becoming one of the most important inputs in the global economy, but the infrastructure for measuring and managing it is still remarkably immature,” said Carmen Li, CEO of Silicon Data. “Every mature market eventually develops independent referees — benchmarks that tell participants what something is worth, whether it performs as promised, and how risk should be measured. That is the role we are building Silicon Data to play for compute.”

Since raising a $4.7 Million seed round in March 2025, Silicon Data has grown from a small data provider to a leading voice in the compute economics ecosystem with over 1000 registered users, trusted for its insights daily by leading semiconductor manufacturers, AI model builders, and financial institutions. It has also built a portfolio of nine financial-grade indices to cover the GPUs and LLMs driving the global AI buildout, as well as market intelligence and alternative datasets that allow investors, infrastructure operators and financial institutions to understand supply, demand, utilization, pricing and economics across the compute ecosystem.

Part of the raise will also fund SiliconMark, which independently benchmarks how physical GPU infrastructure actually performs, since two clusters built on identical chips can deliver meaningfully different real-world output depending on networking, topology, and configuration. Normalizing across GPU performance allows market participants to hedge this output risk, and paves the way for physical delivery of compute resources going forward.

“Futures markets are what let farmers finance the seed and equipment for next season instead of guessing. You can't build against a price you can't see or lock in,” said Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and CIO at Atreides Management. “Compute is now the seed and equipment of the AI economy, being built out at national-infrastructure scale with none of that machinery underneath it. Silicon Data is building the price layer for compute futures that will make the AI buildout easier to finance, and that's a piece this cycle has been missing.”

“Great markets require trusted measurement,” said Antonio Gracias, Founder, CEO & Chief Investment Officer at Valor Equity Partners. “Silicon Data is building foundational data and market intelligence infrastructure that the compute economy needs as artificial intelligence scales. This is a classic pro-entropic business: real-time GPU pricing transparency and performance benchmarking insights create durable value across cycles and uncertainty. We look forward to partnering with this exceptional team.”

Silicon Data spent two years building the pricing and performance history a futures market needed before one existed. This round funds the next phase: making sure every part of the compute economy - buyers, sellers, exchanges, and the institutions now underwriting it - builds on the same reference points.

For more, visit silicondata.com.

About Silicon Data

Silicon Data is the independent benchmark and market intelligence platform for the AI compute economy. The company provides pricing indices, performance benchmarks, forward curves and institutional market data used by compute buyers and sellers, financial institutions, exchanges and infrastructure operators. Its mission is to bring the transparency, standardization and financial infrastructure of mature commodity markets to AI compute.