Silicon Data has 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, Samsung, and others. The funding will expand benchmark pricing, performance measurement, and risk infrastructure for the AI compute economy.
Silicon Data raises $30.5M Series A led by Valor Atreides AI Fund.
CME Group plans to use Silicon Data benchmarks for GPU futures market.
SiliconMark independently benchmarks physical GPU performance.
Portfolio of 9 financial-grade indices for GPUs and LLMs.
1,000+ registered users including semiconductor manufacturers and financial institutions.
Builds price layer for compute futures to finance the AI buildout.
Silicon Data is building the independent benchmark and verification layer for the compute economy. 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. Since raising a seed round in March 2025, Silicon Data has grown to over 1000 registered users, trusted by leading semiconductor manufacturers, AI model builders, and financial institutions.
Part of the raise will 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 output risk and paves the way for physical delivery of compute resources. Silicon Data 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.
"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."
"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."
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.
