Wintermute Trading Ltd., one of crypto's largest market makers, is committing approximately $1 billion over five years to high-frequency trading and AI data center infrastructure, according to a Bloomberg interview with CEO Evgeny Gaevoy. The project will be funded entirely from retained earnings, avoiding external debt or equity, and represents a deliberate effort to transform Wintermute into a multi-asset trading firm competing with the likes of Jane Street Group and Citadel Securities.
The strategy follows a tough stretch in digital asset markets. Wintermute's average daily crypto trading volume dropped from $15 billion in 2025 to $10 billion in 2026, down about 33%. Gaevoy said the data center buildout is meant to power large quantitative models that need continuous retraining — a far heavier computational workload than the firm's traditional crypto trading operations. Non-crypto revenue currently sits at roughly 10% of total income, but Wintermute aims to lift that above 50% by the end of 2027, targeting equities, equity options, commodities, foreign exchange and event contracts. Its U.S. affiliate has registered as a broker-dealer, and a prediction markets desk already launched earlier this year.
The move is part of a broader reallocation of capital from crypto trading and mining toward AI computing. Bitcoin miners are leading that shift. Riot Platforms signed a 20-year compute deal with Anthropic worth about $9.1 billion, with a separate AMD arrangement lifting contracted campus revenue to $9.8 billion. Core Scientific secured a $1 billion J.P. Morgan equipment facility and has anchored its AI-density pivot around a long-term leasing agreement with CoreWeave. MARA Holdings sold roughly $1.5 billion of Bitcoin from its treasury and partnered with Starwood Capital to convert energy-rich mining sites into AI-ready data centers. Industry-wide crypto-to-AI data center contracts now exceed $135 billion.
This convergence carries both opportunity and risk. Building owned data centers locks in fixed costs that mining rigs did not require, while protecting firms from being priced out by cloud vendors if AI demand keeps rising. Institutional spot crypto trading now accounts for 72% of volume, up from 59% a year earlier, but the same institutional growth is pulling infrastructure toward AI hosting. Wintermute's own history — including a $582 million profit in 2021 — is funding the pivot, but the outcome will depend less on Bitcoin's price and more on how long AI compute demand outpaces supply.
