DRW has been an early participant in the development of compute as an institutional market. DRW incubated Compute Exchange, a marketplace connecting enterprises seeking GPU capacity with providers of compute infrastructure, and Silicon Data, which has developed pricing benchmarks, indices, and futures contracts for the GPU compute market.

"Quantitative trading firms are among the most demanding compute customers there are, and they are expanding what they invest in AI infrastructure," said Michael Maniscalco, CEO of QumulusAI. "GPU-as-a-Service will give DRW fast, dedicated access to current-generation Blackwell compute exactly when its teams need it. We are glad to welcome DRW as a customer."

Capacity will be served from QumulusAI’s U.S. data center footprint. The agreement carries an initial one-year term and three one-year renewal options, and a contractual framework that can run up to four years in total.

"We’ve always invested in the research and technology that allow us to test, challenge and refine how we understand markets," said Rich Norman, Chief Information Officer of DRW. "This capacity allows us to run more complex research at greater scale, iterate faster and shorten the distance between a hypothesis and what the data tells us. That ability to keep learning is fundamental to finding new edge."

The agreement follows QumulusAI’s August 7 announcement of an agreement with an agentic hedge fund and brings a second financial-markets customer into a book of business led to date by AI inference platforms. QumulusAI has announced customer agreements valued at more than $246 million in aggregate since early June.