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UK high-speed trader XTX Markets is building a vast data centre in Finland to handle the information for the $250bn worth of deals that it makes every day, bucking the trend among financial services groups to offload IT to Silicon Valley’s biggest technology groups.
The London-based market maker, which uses complex algorithms to buy and sell, is building a site with a 250 megawatt capacity in the Kajaani district in central Finland. The first building will manage computing power of 22.5MW, according to figures seen by the Financial Times.
The plans, which will take about two years to complete, underscore the scale and importance of processing power for XTX, which employs more than 200 people but no human traders, and makes markets in stocks, bonds, crypto and other assets.
“Modern, deep learning models require vast amounts of compute and so we have secured the Kajaani site to increase our capacity in a maximally sustainable way,” said Joshua Leahy, chief technology officer at XTX.
Space in data centres around Europe is tight, with demand far outstripping supply, according to a survey in February by real estate company CBRE. Last year European supply increased 10 per cent to 561MW, the company said.
Nordic countries are popular locations for hosting data centres, because of their cheap electricity and cold climates which means there is less need to cool servers down. Earlier this year Google said it was building a 240MW data centre in Norway.
The market maker has a supercomputer based in Iceland, according to two people familiar with the matter, while the Finnish data centre will add to its processing power.
In choosing to build its own data centre, XTX is bucking a trend among financial services companies to turn to Big Tech for help, as they try to manage the vast troves of data that power global capital markets.
Citadel Securities, a rival to XTX, has switched storing data and testing its algorithms from its own servers to Google’s cloud services, the FT reported this week, while stock exchange groups such as Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange Group are also using Big Tech companies’ cloud platforms to store and manipulate their data.
XTX declined to comment on the size of the data centre investment.
It uses 25,000 graphics processing units to power its research, underscoring the importance of processing power for running its algorithms.
By comparison, the EU’s Leonardo supercomputer has nearly 14,000 GPUs, capable of doing 174mn bn calculations per second when it was unveiled in 2022.
GPUs process data quickly and demand for them has surged amid the artificial intelligence boom, as companies and governments clamour for the ability to train AI models.
Founded by mathematician Alex Gerko in 2015, XTX has grown to become one of the UK’s most profitable private companies, and among the world’s biggest proprietary trading firms. It made a record £1.1bn profit last year, making billionaire Gerko, who owns 75 per cent of the company, the UK’s top taxpayer. The co-chief executive paid £664.5mn in tax last year, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
