B200 Rental Price Update, August 2026: The Quietest Month Yet
B200 rental index at 5.62 entering September, up 27.6% YTD: the quietest month yet, a term curve below spot, and B200 futures listing in October.
Updated September 3, 2026. Term-structure values as of September 7, 2026.
The SDB200RT index, our daily benchmark of B200 rental rates quoted by neocloud providers, entered September at 5.62 dollars per GPU-hour, up 27.6% year to date. August was the quietest month in the series so far: every daily value sat between 5.58 and 5.69, a spread of 2.0%, with no day moving more than 1.2% and the month's mean and median both at 5.63.
What the index measures
SDB200RT is Silicon Data's daily benchmark for renting NVIDIA's Blackwell-generation B200 on the neocloud tier, expressed as a rental price per GPU-hour. It is built from provider quotes standardized for term, configuration, and contract type, so that a change in the index reflects a change in the market rather than a change in which configurations happened to be quoted that day. It is a benchmark, not a traded price: the number to compare an invoice against, and from October the number that B200 futures settle against.
Three months of settling
Since July 1 the index has not been below 5.58. June ran between 5.26 and 5.45 and ended the month at 5.36; July stepped up and ran a wider range, 5.62 to 6.01, with a mean of 5.72; August narrowed to the 5.58 to 5.69 band and ended at 5.62. Over the three months to September 1 the index is up 3.7%.
| Month | Start | End | Low | High | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun | 5.42 | 5.36 | 5.26 | 5.45 | -1.1% |
| Jul | 5.63 | 5.67 | 5.62 | 6.01 | +0.8% |
| Aug | 5.67 | 5.62 | 5.58 | 5.69 | -0.9% |
Source: Silicon Data SDB200RT daily index values. September 1 value: 5.62.
Measured as annualized volatility from daily log changes on a calendar-day basis, August ran at 7.1%, the lowest month of 2026 and roughly a quarter of July's. A rate agreed at the start of August was within about 2% of any rate available that month.
What it costs to lock B200 in
The spot index is the price of a B200-hour today. The term structure is the price of committing to one for longer, and on September 7 it sat below spot at every tenor: 5.73 dollars per hour for a 3-month term, 5.64 for 6 months, and 5.39 for 12 months, against a spot index of 5.69 that day. The term-implied forward rate, the market's price for a B200-hour at a future date rather than a contract running to it, was 5.68 three months out, 5.41 at six months, and 5.03 at twelve.
A curve shaped like that is described as backwardated: committing for a year costs about 5% less per hour than renting today, and the forward rate a year out sits about 12% below spot. For a buyer with a known multi-month workload, the term structure is quoting a discount for commitment; for a provider, it is the market's current price for a year of capacity. It is what the market transacts at today, not a forecast of next summer.
The generational spread
The B200 rate has held a stable relationship to the chips below it. On July 27, the most recent date with both series in hand for this review, the B200 index stood at 5.66 against an H100 Neo-Cloud rate of 2.75, a premium of roughly 106%. On September 7 the portal showed B200 at 5.69 against H200 at 3.29 and H100 at 2.63, which puts the B200 at about 1.7 times the H200 and 2.2 times the H100 on that day.
A newer generation renting at about twice the prior one, and holding that ratio through the summer, is consistent with the market pricing the generational gap as a structural spread rather than a launch premium that decays. The H200's smaller premium over the H100, reviewed in our H200 vs H100 comparison, sits one rung down. A price ladder is not a performance ratio; how evenly the rungs are spaced depends on the workload.
What October adds
As currently announced, and pending CFTC review, NYMEX lists B200 rental index futures for trading from October 5 under the code GPU2, alongside the H100 contract. Each contract covers 730 GPU-hours, one B200 for one average month, and is financially settled against this index; no hardware changes hands. That makes SDB200RT the settlement benchmark for an exchange-listed contract on Blackwell-generation compute.
August is a useful month to picture what the contract is for. The index's daily moves are the size of the risk it transfers: in August a few cents a day, in July tens of cents. From October, that is what the contract is designed to carry: the difference between the index and a level agreed in advance, independent of any one provider's terms. The practitioner's guide to the contracts walks through that arithmetic step by step.
What three months do and do not establish
The daily series establishes the level and the shape: the index has held above 5.58 since July 1, August was the narrowest full month in the series since it began in August 2025, the term structure sits below spot at every tenor, and the spread to the H100 stayed near 2x. Those are measured.
What it does not establish is whether August's calm is a resting level or a pause. B200 is a young index in a market where capacity arrives in lumps and quotes can move together when it does, and three quiet months are not a trend. Nor does a backwardated curve establish that rates will fall; it establishes what commitment costs today. The daily series will record which it turns out to be.
Track B200 pricing daily with Silicon Data
This update is built on Silicon Data's platform, updated daily: the GPU Pricing Dataset for spot, on-demand, and reserved quotes across GPU chipsets, SiliconIndex for benchmarks such as SDB200RT, the term-implied forward curve for what commitment costs, and SiliconPriceIQ for forward price scenarios by chip, region, configuration, and term, all available via API.
Source: Silicon Data. SDB200RT daily index values, June 1 to September 1, 2026, in dollars per GPU-hour; term and forward rates as published on September 7, 2026. Volatility computed from daily log changes within each month and annualized on a calendar-day basis, consistent with the convention in our cash-settled compute futures research. Futures contract terms as announced by CME Group, subject to regulatory review. Nothing in this update is a recommendation to trade.