Hudson River Trading Signs Multibillion-Dollar CoreWeave Deal for Nvidia's Newest AI Chips

Hudson River Trading, one of the largest nonbank trading firms in the country, signed a multiyear agreement worth billions of dollars with CoreWeave on Thursday, August 20, to expand the computing power behind its trading research and models.

CoreWeave Chief Revenue Officer Jon Jones told Bloomberg the deal is a "material expansion" of an existing partnership. He wouldn't say how much money is actually on the table. Neither company disclosed specific contract terms in Thursday's official announcement, according to CoreWeave's own release.

HRT will become one of the first CoreWeave customers to get wide-scale access to Nvidia's newest Vera Rubin chips, including the Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, alongside existing Nvidia HGX B200 GPU systems, according to Pulse2.

The deal also includes something called Direct Connect networking, built on Nvidia's Spectrum-X Ethernet, which links HRT's own on-site data centers to CoreWeave's cloud with low latency. HRT wants its in-house computers talking to CoreWeave's rented computers as fast as physically possible, because in trading, milliseconds are money.

Not CoreWeave's first Wall Street rodeo

HRT actually became a CoreWeave customer back in March 2026. This new agreement takes what CoreWeave calls a growing relationship and turns it into a long-term, locked-in compute deal. CoreWeave flagged the expanding HRT partnership in its second-quarter earnings report last week, according to Crypto Briefing.

HRT isn't the only quant shop CoreWeave has landed. Jane Street, one of HRT's biggest competitors, committed $6 billion to CoreWeave data center capacity and separately invested $1 billion directly into the company, according to BigGo Finance. That deal closed in April, according to TradingKey.

Kevin Lee, HRT's head of research and development, said in CoreWeave's official statement that more computing power lets the firm's researchers "run more experiments" and potentially find new trading opportunities. He also credited CoreWeave with delivering infrastructure on schedule and running Nvidia hardware efficiently. A real compliment in an industry where delayed chip deliveries have burned plenty of AI companies.

Why CoreWeave needs this

CoreWeave has a Microsoft problem it's trying to solve. Microsoft once accounted for more than 70% of CoreWeave's sales, according to BigGo Finance. That's the kind of customer concentration that makes investors nervous. Lose one big client, lose the company. Financial services is CoreWeave's chosen escape hatch, and landing both HRT and Jane Street in the same year is proof the strategy is working, at least so far.

CoreWeave also raised prices roughly 25% in July and expects higher profit margins on its newer contracts, according to BigGo Finance. The company has been raising substantial debt to fund the data center buildout needed to serve customers like HRT and Jane Street. Goldman Sachs was reportedly preparing a $1.15 billion junk bond issuance tied to a CoreWeave data center as of Thursday, according to Gate News.

That debt load is worth watching. CoreWeave's stock fell 12% on August 18 as debt costs rose alongside Treasury yields, according to Gate News, and shares were down another 1.39% as of Thursday's report. A company financing its AI infrastructure buildout with junk bonds is betting heavily that demand from customers like HRT keeps growing fast enough to service that debt. If AI compute demand cools or financing costs keep climbing, that bet gets a lot more expensive.

Wall Street's rush into frontier AI infrastructure raises a fair question: is this a genuine productivity leap, or a herd move where quant firms feel they can't afford to be the one shop without cutting-edge compute? Jon Jones told Bloomberg that financial firms are increasingly adopting the same advanced infrastructure used by frontier AI model developers. That's true. It's also exactly the kind of statement a CoreWeave revenue executive is paid to make.

None of the coverage reviewed here — not Bloomberg's reporting, not CoreWeave's own release, not the trade outlets covering the deal — discloses the actual dollar figure. "Multibillion-dollar" is doing a lot of work in every headline, including this one, because that's genuinely all that's been confirmed.

What happens next is straightforward to track: CoreWeave's next earnings report will show whether financial services revenue is actually scaling the way the company claims, and whether its debt-fueled data center expansion is generating returns fast enough to keep bond investors comfortable.