Jump Trading and DRW commit traders and capital to compute power contracts

Jump Trading and DRW are putting real traders and real money behind a market that, until recently, mostly lived in conference panels: financial contracts tied to computing power. The AI boom runs on GPUs. Now two of the best-known proprietary trading firms want to turn the rental of those chips into something you can price, hedge, and trade like a commodity. Jump buys a team, DRW builds the plumbing Jump’s move came on October 12-13, 2026, when the firm said it had hired the entire founding team of Itô. The startup specialized in trading compute and inference, the process of running a trained AI model to produce answers. Rather than acquire the company outright, Jump brought the people in-house to set up and run a dedicated compute trading desk. The desk will start with mid-market bilateral contracts. These are private, two-party agreements rather than standardized products listed on an exchange. Those deals typically run 3 to 5 years and are usually valued in the tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars. DRW has taken a wider and earlier route. Instead of a single desk, it has been building the infrastructure the market would need to function. The firm incubated Compute Exchang...