Wintermute Puts $1B Into AI Data Centers and HFT as TradFi Push Accelerates

Wintermute plans to sink up to $1 billion into artificial intelligence data center infrastructure and high-frequency trading over the next five years, CEO Evgeny Gaevoy told Bloomberg. The goal is to flip the firm's revenue mix: non-crypto activity, now roughly 10% of total business, should top 50% by the end of 2027.

To get there, Wintermute will double headcount at its New York office, currently 17 people, and add about 40% more staff across the rest of the firm, Gaevoy said.

The move puts Wintermute in a growing pack of crypto-native firms reaching into traditional finance. Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken already list tokenized stocks. Crypto.com jumped in with access to 1,500 underlying equities and funds.

Wall Street is pushing back the other way. In March the SEC approved a Nasdaq pilot to trade tokenized versions of high-volume stocks and securities. Days later the New York Stock Exchange teamed up with Securitize to build blockchain-based trading infrastructure for tokenized stocks and ETFs.

Wintermute's bet on AI infrastructure rests on a conviction that machine-learning-driven high-frequency trading will be the next competitive battleground in both crypto and traditional markets, Gaevoy said. The firm sees an edge in marrying its existing market-making technology with AI models purpose-built for latency-sensitive execution.

The five-year horizon leaves room for the plan to shift. Gaevoy did not name specific AI data center projects or HFT strategies the capital would target, saying more details would come as investments are made. The New York office expansion is expected to start in the coming months.