Jump and DRW Position Themselves in Emerging Market for AI Computing Power Derivatives

Two major trading firms are committing traders and capital to an emerging market for financial contracts tied to computing power, as Wall Street moves to make the infrastructure behind the AI boom a tradable asset class. Jump Trading has assembled a dedicated compute trading desk that will use its own balance sheet to take positions in bilateral, over-the-counter contracts—private agreements typically running 3 to 5 years and valued in the tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars. The firm hired the entire founding team from Itô, a startup focused on compute and inference trading, including executives Affaan Mustafa and Alejandro Soumah Fernandez, to lead the effort.