China has begun designing a futures market for AI tokens. The effort, still in its earliest phases, marks a distinct approach from American exchanges racing to list contracts on GPU compute power. Sources close to the planning told Reuters the Shanghai Futures Exchange is studying contracts tied to the smallest units of information that AI models process. Tokens serve as the basic building block. They measure consumption inside large language models. One source described the research as preliminary. Another noted the work draws partial motivation from the intensifying competition with the United States. But the contrast stands out. CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have moved toward futures linked to the cost of renting computing hardware. Shanghai’s version would connect instead to how companies price AI services themselves. Both products aim to give participants across the supply chain a way to protect against swings in the expense of powering intelligence at scale. The timing feels urgent.…