Wall Street's fastest traders are building data centers and backing chip startups to stay ahead in AI

High-frequency trading firms including Jane Street and Hudson River Trading are spending billions on cloud contracts, startups and their own data centers to secure AI compute for machine-learning-driven market prediction, with one executive estimating compute spending is now ten to twenty times higher than before ChatGPT launched. XTX Markets is building a data center in Finland, Jane Street runs one in Texas with more than 4,000 Nvidia GPUs, and Hudson River spends $1 billion a year on AI and signed a multiyear deal with CoreWeave. Jane Street instead invested $1 billion directly in CoreWeave, committed $6 billion to its computing services, and led a funding round for chip startup Etched, becoming its first customer.