Quant Trading Firm IMC Expands Cloud Deal with CoreWeave for AI-Driven Strategy Research

Global quantitative trading firm IMC has signed an expanded contract with CoreWeave, significantly scaling up its use of the neocloud provider's platform to support research into new trading strategies. The deal marks a deepening of a relationship that began in 2025, when IMC first ran CoreWeave clusters in production, and comes as the trader faces growing demands from increasingly complex models and expanding data volumes.

Under the new agreement, IMC will leverage CoreWeave's high-performance compute capacity to run experiments in parallel, enabling faster iteration and more sophisticated strategy development. While the financial value of the contract was not disclosed, IMC described it as a "significantly larger commitment" than its previous engagement with the cloud provider.

The partnership highlights the growing reliance of quantitative trading firms on specialized cloud infrastructure, where speed and low latency are critical to gaining a competitive edge. Algorithmic trading, a form of high-frequency trading, depends heavily on compute performance and network responsiveness, making the choice of infrastructure a strategic one.

Rob Burke, chief technology officer at IMC, said the collaboration goes beyond a typical vendor relationship. "CoreWeave engages with us as a design partner, enabling IMC to influence the systems we run on and iterate quickly alongside their engineers," he said. "That partnership, along with the performance and availability we saw from the outset, gave us the confidence to commit to a much larger footprint with CoreWeave as our infrastructure demands grow."

Jon Jones, chief revenue officer at CoreWeave, echoed that sentiment, emphasizing the fit between the company's platform and IMC's workloads. "IMC operates at the frontier of quantitative research, running large, complex models on massive datasets where every millisecond of compute time matters," he said. "CoreWeave was built for exactly this kind of workload — high-performance, highly customizable infrastructure that runs reliably at scale."

This is not the first time CoreWeave has attracted a client from the quantitative trading sector. Earlier this year, Jane Street, another prominent trading firm, signed a deal to secure $6 billion in AI cloud capacity from CoreWeave. In a related move, Hudson River Trading opted in May 2026 to use Lambda, a CoreWeave competitor, for its AI cloud needs, underscoring the intensifying competition in the neocloud market.

IMC, which has operated in financial markets since 1989 and now focuses on quantitative trading, maintains a presence across numerous global stock exchanges. While the full extent of its data center footprint is unclear, a recent job listing points to a specific facility in Somerset, New Jersey, where the firm runs part of its trading infrastructure.

CoreWeave, for its part, reported Q2 2026 earnings with revenue of $2.575 billion, though its operating loss widened to $49 million. The company's capital expenditure for the quarter reached $9.4 billion, reflecting its aggressive expansion strategy to meet surging demand for AI compute capacity.

The expanded agreement between IMC and CoreWeave underscores a broader industry trend: as quantitative trading models grow more complex and data-intensive, firms are increasingly turning to specialized cloud providers that can deliver the performance, scalability, and customization required to stay ahead in a millisecond-driven market.