Capital markets infrastructure provider Options Technology has announced a significant expansion of its private cloud infrastructure with a new AI-optimised data centre in Iceland. The move is a direct response to the escalating demand from financial firms for high-density computing power, driven by the rapid adoption of AI for trading strategies, risk management, and data analytics.
The new facility, powered entirely by renewable energy, aims to provide hedge funds, investment banks, and proprietary trading firms with a scalable, secure, and sustainable environment for their most demanding workloads, while offering significant cost reductions compared to traditional data centres in major financial hubs.The choice of Iceland is a strategic one, addressing the dual challenges of power scarcity and cost volatility in established financial centres. Bill Mandra, Global Data Centre Director of Options Technology, explains to TradingTech Insight the rationale behind the decision.
He says, “Following conversations with customers who were looking for higher power density than is available in traditional financial hubs like New York and London, we started looking at various locations that could serve both the US and European markets, with the ability to provide significantly more compute power, more quickly and at a reasonable cost, with good connectivity. Iceland fit the bill perfectly, positioned right between the two main financial hubs. The power is all renewable, either geothermal or hydro-powered. This, along with the stability of power pricing, offers a significant advantage.”
To deliver the new service, Options has partnered with Nordic data centre operator atNorth, a collaboration that Mandra says is crucial for ensuring long-term scalability and meeting future client demand.
“We will be hosting with atNorth in Iceland, who have an excellent roadmap and the ability to expand,” he says. “We aren’t concerned about future capacity limitations because they have plenty of land and are constantly building out to meet demand. This is very important for our long-term plans.”
The core of the new offering is a significant enhancement of the firm’s private cloud platform, designed specifically for the high-density requirements of AI and machine learning.
Mandra explains, “We are offering our private cloud solution, Horizon, with GPU availability. In Iceland, we can achieve a much higher density, about a 3x increase over a traditional data centre. This provides ample room for both traditional CPU and GPU compute. While our primary offering will be bare metal, we will also provide virtualised and containerised options for clients who need to test applications or don’t require full bare metal access. Additionally, our tick history will be available as part of the offering; each server will have high-speed connectivity to petabytes of historical data for retrieval.”
This combination of high-performance compute and ready access to vast datasets is aimed squarely at two key use cases that are becoming central to the modern quantitative trading firm.
“One of the key use cases is for quant hedge funds and trading firms wanting to train strategy algorithms using not only our tick history but also their own proprietary data in a secure and isolated private environment,” says Mandra. “They can perform the training in Iceland before transferring the models to their co-located servers at the exchanges for execution. Another significant use case involves clients who want to explore AI. They may have experimented with public cloud offerings but found challenges with data transfer costs. We provide the infrastructure for them to ‘kick the tires’ for a short period to see if a solution works for them. If it does, they can then deploy a dedicated environment with much more compute power. It’s a testing playground tailored to financial services, with access to the markets. With our AtlasFeed normalised market data product, we can also stream real-time data into Iceland from over 200 markets around the world.”
Ultimately, the Iceland expansion is a strategic play that positions Options as a specialised provider in an era dominated by hyperscale public clouds. Mandra frames the initiative as a targeted solution for an industry with unique demands that generic providers often fail to meet.
He concludes, “The key message here is that we are providing a private cloud infrastructure environment specifically tailored to the needs of the financial services industry, filling the gaps where public cloud providers fall short. We aren’t a hyperscaler like Amazon; their focus is on the enterprise at large. They don’t have the specialised experience required to meet the specific needs of financial market participants. Options, on the other hand, has decades of experience working with financial firms and we understand what they require. It makes sense for us to build something specifically tailored to them, rather than relying on a more general offering from someone else.”
Subscribe to our newsletter
