From Bloomberg, January 21:
- Billionaire’s quant firm plans five data centers in Finland
- The move bucks trend of relying on third-party infrastructure
Billionaire Alex Gerko’s quantitative-trading firm XTX Markets is investing more than €1 billion ($1 billion) building five data centers in Finland to underpin its growing use of machine learning.
The London-based market maker, which uses complex algorithms to trade over $250 billion worth of assets a day, will build the hub in the area around Kajaani, in central Finland, where it owns a 478-acre site, XTX said in a statement on Wednesday.
The first data center, which it expects to complete next year, will have a floorspace of 15,000 square meters — approximately equivalent to two football pitches — and the whole project may take about five years.
XTX is bucking the industry trend of farming out its computational needs to third-party run infrastructure — which can be a comparatively fast process. Chief Technology Officer Joshua Leahy says the firm’s big bet on using machine learning to produce price forecasts means it’s ultimately more cost-effective and easier to guarantee capacity with its own infrastructure.
“By building things ourselves, we can build ahead of our needs,” he said in an interview. “Because of the way we use machine learning to build our trading strategies, we have been confident that we can apply more compute power to ultimately generate better returns.”
Finland’s cool climate has attracted similar investments from other companies and Alphabet Inc. also announced a €1 billion investment last year. Kajaani is already home to Europe’s LUMI supercomputer, one of the fastest globally....
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