(Bloomberg) -- Wintermute Trading Ltd. intends to invest about $1 billion in high-frequency trading and artificial intelligence data center infrastructure over the next five years, as the digital assets market maker looks to diversify into traditional markets following a slump in crypto.
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The nine-year-old trading firm is attempting to reinvent itself as a dealer in equities, commodities and foreign exchange, in the mold of heavyweights such as Jane Street Group or Citadel Securities, Founder and Chief Executive Officer Evgeny Gaevoy said in an interview.
"We are now going up against firms that have spent decades optimizing their technology and infrastructure for these markets, so obviously the level of investment required is significant," he said.
The $1 billion commitment underscores how steep the price of admission into Wall Street's high-octane markets has become. Alex Gerko's quantitative trading firm XTX Markets said last year that it would spend €1 billion ($1 billion) building five data centers in Finland to buttress its machine learning strategies. Jane Street, too, plans to build and finance its own data center to keep pace with computing power demands.
For London-based Wintermute, being able to compete means "going beyond shaving microseconds off execution," Gaevoy said. "Training and continuously retraining much more sophisticated quantitative models on enormous amounts of market data, as well as having access to compute, storage, and networking capacity, is essential." Wintermute expects to finance the infrastructure spending using retained earnings, Gaevoy added.
The privately-held company recorded profits of $582 million in the crypto bull market of 2021, according to a Forbes report, but hasn't published financial performance figures since. The firm was profitable in 2025 and is on track to do the same this year, Gaevoy said, declining to provide more details.
Crypto is currently languishing in a prolonged bear market that has dragged Bitcoin to roughly half its October high of over $126,000. Wintermute's average daily trading volume has fallen from about $15 billion last year to $10 billion this year, Gaevoy said.
Its expansion into equities, commodities and prediction markets, meanwhile, is only just beginning to bear fruit: 10% of the firm's revenue comes from non-crypto markets today. Its goal is for that figure to top 50% by the end of 2027.