A proprietary trading firm has just signed one of the largest AI cloud contracts of the year. Jane Street is committing roughly $13bn over five years to Crusoe, the data centre company, for clusters of AI chips and the infrastructure around them.
The terms were first reported by Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the arrangement, and it gives Crusoe the most prominent customer its cloud business has landed.
What makes it unusual is who is buying. Jane Street trades securities rather than selling software, and it has now contracted more AI compute than most model developers ever will.
This is its second such deal in short order. The firm signed a $6bn cloud contract with CoreWeave and put $1bn of equity into the company, which takes its committed spending across two suppliers to around $19bn.
Quantitative trading has always been compute-hungry. Pricing models, risk systems and signal research run on the same hardware that trains language models, and a firm at Jane Street’s scale would rather lock in capacity than bid for it later.
