Carmen Li of Compute Exchange joined Blockspace Live today, showing one surprising chart: the H100 rental forward curve is in contango.

A 36-month contract signed today runs about $2.36 per GPU-hour, whereas a 24-month runs about $2.30. The longer you commit, the more you pay per hour, which is the opposite of the volume discount most markets give you. Last November these curves sloped down, but now they have inverted.

As Colin put it, nothing crystallizes the everyone is short compute narrative more than that.

On the show, Li said buyers are paying a premium just to lock in the resource rather than sit at the mercy of spot, and suppliers with pricing power can push the whole market toward three-year terms.

The secondary market tells the same story in physical goods. Michael San Miguel of Luxor's hardware desk said used H100 nodes that went for about $150,000 to $170,000 in April now move at about $260,000 to $280,000, with the occasional unused unit near $300,000. That is close to a 70% jump in five months for two-year-old silicon!

H200 nodes sit at low-to-mid $300,000s, and even A100s hold at about $70,000 to $90,000. Older GPUs are running near full utilization, which is why the CoreWeave CFO now pegs the H100’s useful life at eight to ten years, while many analysts still model five.

Cutting the other way, token costs are beginning to drop, as seen with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s announced drop in some ChatGPT 5.6 token prices. But just because it’s cheaper for OpenAI’s model, doesn’t mean its cheaper for enterprise buyers of compute.

Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT)'s proposed 500-megawatt data center in central Illinois faces another permitting delay after the Village of Latham canceled an Aug. 3 vote on annexing and rezoning the project site. Village officials determined the proposal lacked enough votes to pass, according to WAND-TV. The application, filed by Logan Prairie Data Center LLC, has not been withdrawn and could return for a later hearing.

Public equities for AI data center operators are trading at a discount even as the leases underpinning those valuations become larger, longer and more profitable, according to a new report from Needham & Company. Data center operators are trading at an average 10.8 multiple to Needham & Company's discounted 2028 estimated EV/EBITDA, compared to a 15-to-20-times range that investors commonly viewed as appropriate over the past 12 to 18 months. That multiple is 30% to 50% below where the sector traded a few months ago.

B. Riley Securities named Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) and Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) its top near-term HPC picks Friday, arguing that rapid contracting and improving financing conditions could support a recovery from the sector's July selloff. The broker raised its Core Scientific price target to $42 from $33 and its Applied Digital target to $75 from $66, maintaining Buy ratings on both. Core Scientific closed Thursday at $21.81, while Applied Digital closed at $27.97.

Crusoe registered two additional data-center buildings at its Goodnight campus near Claude, Texas, with estimated construction costs totaling $1 billion, according to filings. The buildings would add about 1.61 million square feet to the Armstrong County development. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filings identify Crusoe affiliate GN DC1 LLC as the owner.

Sphere 3D (NASDAQ: ANY) is pursuing a 50-megawatt AI data center in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, alongside the conversion of its existing 15-megawatt bitcoin mine to other computing workloads. North Campbell Land Co., Sphere 3D's local operating company, presented both proposals during a July 27 public hearing on potential data-center zoning rules. The city's zoning code does not treat data centers as their own land-use category.

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