Silicon Data announced on August 11, 2026 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, plus Breed, Hack, Blank VC, Sancus Ventures and SoGal Ventures.
Benchmarks for a maturing compute market
Silicon Data is building an independent benchmark and verification layer for the AI compute economy — pricing indices, GPU performance benchmarks, forward curves and institutional market data for buyers, sellers, exchanges and financial institutions. CEO Carmen Li frames it as bringing the discipline of mature commodity markets to compute: "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."
Wiring CME's GPU futures market
The raise coincides with CME Group's preparation to use Silicon Data benchmarks as the reference price for its planned cash-settled GPU futures contracts, pending regulatory approval — a first for the derivatives giant. Silicon Data is also expanding SiliconMark, which normalises real-world GPU cluster output across networking and topology so market participants can hedge performance risk and eventually settle physical delivery of compute.
From nine indices to a market layer
Since a $4.7M seed in March 2025, Silicon Data says it has grown to more than 1,000 registered users at semiconductor manufacturers, AI model builders and financial institutions, and built a portfolio of nine financial-grade indices covering the GPUs and LLMs driving the AI buildout. Valor Equity Partners founder Antonio Gracias called the company "foundational data and market intelligence infrastructure that the compute economy needs as AI scales."
The round adds to a busy week of AI infrastructure financings, following Vantage Data Centers weighing a $100B IPO and Meeza's $432M Qatar data-centre raise.
Reporting based on coverage from Business Wire, Yahoo Finance and Axios Pro.