Lamda wins cloud deal with Hudson River Trading to supply access to Nvidia chips

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, May 20 (Reuters) – Artificial intelligence cloud computing startup Lamda on Wednesday said it has won a cloud contract with high-speed trading firm Hudson River Trading.

Lamba, which is backed by Nvidia and raised $1.5 billion last year after signing a deal to provide Microsoft with access to Nvidia’s chips, said the deal with Hudson River Trading will entail renting more than 1,000 of Nvidia’s latest “Blackwell” systems to the trading firm, which Reuters last month reported had $12.3 billion in trading revenues last year.

Lamda and Hudson River Trading did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Stephen Balaban, co-founder and chief technology officer at Lamda, said the deal involved Nvidia systems that Lamda has already purchased and installed in a data center, rather than a new purchase of chips.

Hudson River Trading is a major customer for Alphabet’s Google Cloud, but has only announced use of Nvidia’s chips in Google’s cloud, rather than Google’s own custom AI chips. Balaban said the ubiquity of Nvidia’s AI chips has become one of their strongest selling points to large customers like Hudson River Trading.

“It’s the only product that’s available in every one of the major cloud providers,” Balaban told Reuters.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)