From cloud contracts to chip bets
One industry executive estimates that computing costs are now 10–20 times higher than before ChatGPT launched.
The companies are taking different routes to secure capacity:
The cost of waiting
Bloomberg reports that industry participants see rising costs and rapidly obsolete chips as serious risks. Yet executives, including Jan Bomars, CEO of Amsterdam-based high-frequency trading firm Optiver, argue that doing nothing is more dangerous.
That is the central tension: capacity is expensive, and today’s hardware may not stay useful for long. I think the striking part is not simply that trading firms want more compute; it is that Jane Street is spreading its bet across both a cloud provider and a chip maker. The announcement says little about what returns would justify those commitments, or how quickly the firms expect their AI workloads to repay them. Without that, the spending signals urgency more clearly than it demonstrates an advantage.
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