Quant trading firms have always been on the cutting edge of hardware, using programmable chips like ASICs and FPGAs to power ultra-low latency trading systems in the high-frequency trading era . Now, with machine learning strategies dominating the market, it's all about who has the most compute power. The more compute power, the more interesting the employer.

Why do quant trading firms want GPUs? Who works with them?

GPUs provide the compute power that traders at these firms need to power their machine learning strategies. Firms like Jane Street have been increasingly looking at alternative data like satellite imagery which can be messy and hard to fit into trading models without the assistance of an LLM to find signal in the noise. Trading firms use GPUs to train their proprietary LLMs. Machine learning quants use those LLMs alongside tools like PyTorch to build powerful trading models using statistical techniques like linear regression on a massive scale.

What does that mean for hiring?…