#641
Plumbing the AI Trade
Published:
May 09, 2026
Author:
Sarah Parsons Wolter
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Investors hunting AI exposure are reaching for some unlikely tickers: a 175-year-old glassmaker, a Japanese toilet company whose ceramics line Palliser Capital dubbed the "most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary," and a sneaker brand that rebranded to NewbirdAI and promptly soared 582% in a single day. When the cleanest way to bet on compute is a Washlet manufacturer, the market is telling you something is missing.
Larry Fink wants to fix that. Speaking this week, the BlackRock CEO floated a futures market for computing power, arguing that compute capacity has become foundational enough to deserve the same financial plumbing as oil or natural gas. A liquid exchange would let AI buyers hedge cost exposure, give data-center operators a way to monetize spare capacity, and give investors a direct instrument instead of triangulating through Corning, Caterpillar, and Toto.
Some of that infrastructure is already taking shape: Compute Exchange has been quietly building a marketplace to do exactly this, running auctions for GPU capacity and laying the groundwork for the kind of standardized contracts a futures market would need.
The engineering is hard as a unit of compute in Virginia is not interchangeable with one in Singapore. But when the head of an $11.5t asset manager calls for a new commodity exchange, capital listens. Until then, the most direct play on the AI build-out is, regrettably, a toilet.
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Plumbing the AI Trade
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