QumulusAI, a cloud infrastructure provider focused on AI computing, has signed a GPU-as-a-Service agreement with DRW, a global trading firm specializing in commodities, derivatives, and emerging asset classes, to provide DRW with a dedicated cluster of NVIDIA's Blackwell B300 GPUs.
DRW has already been active in helping build out compute as an institutional asset class. The firm previously incubated Compute Exchange, a marketplace connecting companies that need GPU capacity with providers who supply it, as well as Silicon Data, which has developed pricing benchmarks, indices, and futures contracts specifically for the GPU compute market.
Michael Maniscalco, CEO of QumulusAI, said quantitative trading firms are among the most demanding compute customers around, and that they're increasingly expanding what they invest in AI infrastructure. He said the GPU-as-a-Service arrangement gives DRW fast, dedicated access to current-generation Blackwell compute exactly when its teams need it, and that QumulusAI is glad to welcome DRW as a customer.
The GPU capacity will be delivered from QumulusAI's U.S. data centers. The agreement starts with an initial one-year term, with three additional one-year renewal options built in, giving it a contractual framework that could extend up to four years total.
Rich Norman, chief information officer at DRW, said the firm has always invested in the research and technology needed to test, challenge, and refine how it understands markets. He said this additional compute capacity lets DRW run more complex research at greater scale, iterate faster, and shorten the gap between forming a hypothesis and seeing what the data actually shows, which he described as fundamental to finding a competitive edge in trading.
The deal follows an announcement QumulusAI made on August 7 involving an agentic hedge fund, and marks the second financial-markets customer added to a customer base that, until now, has been led primarily by AI inference platforms. Since early June, QumulusAI says it has announced customer agreements worth more than $246 million in total.
