Google Cloud is providing a private cloud region and colocation facility for financial services company CME Group in Aurora, Illinois.
The private Google Cloud region will host a specialized platform to support global trading of CME's futures and options markets and will provide traders with access to a cloud-based low-latency network and high-performance computing.
CME Group's clients will be able to use existing connectivity options in the Chicago area and have access points to other global markets. They can choose self-managed infrastructure in the colocation facility, or use Google's cloud solutions including artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
"This is a significant step forward in our partnership with Google Cloud that is revolutionizing our industry,” said CME Group chairman and CEO Terry Duffy. “Located within close proximity to our current data center campus, and with disaster recovery facilities in Dallas, Texas, Google Cloud’s new specialized platform will extend the benefits we can provide to our clients through next-generation cloud technology, expanded access, and efficiencies, a broader range of customized connectivity options, and faster product development, with minimal disruption to their current operations.”
Clients can use Google Cloud's data cloud products like BigQuery and AlloyDB, and its AI and machine learning platform, Vertex AI, to experiment with new modeling techniques such as time-series forecasting.
“Our latest milestone with CME Group builds on our shared goal to accelerate CME’s move to the cloud and innovate capital markets infrastructure worldwide,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “Through our collaboration, we’re harnessing the best of cloud computing, data analytics, and AI, while respecting the existing custom hardware requirements of market participants to bring low latency, deterministic, and scalable trading environments to CME Group customers and the broader financial markets.”
The cloud platform is currently being developed and some capabilities are already available for testing via the Dallas Google Cloud Region which will eventually become its disaster recovery region, while work on the private Google Cloud region in Aurora will begin later this year. Customers will have at least 18 months notice before CME migrates to the platform.
CME Group and Google have had a relationship since 2021 when the cloud provider invested $1bn in the company. Earlier this year, Google made enhancements to the cloud-based data platform currently used by CME, and helped migrate critical clearing applications to the cloud.
CME Group is a financial services company based in Chicago, Illinois. The company operates financial derivatives exchanges including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, and The Commodity Exchange.
The company built its own core and backup data centers in the US, and hosted with Equinix in Europe from 2013.
Then in 2016, it sold off its main data center to CyrusOne in a $130m deal - which included a 15-year leaseback, where the exchange would continue to host its primary electronic trading platform CME Globex, and other services from the data center. Since the 2021 investment by Google, CME has been migrating its IT infrastructure to Google's cloud in phases.
Other major financial institutions with cloud computing relationships include Nasdaq, which has an ongoing cloud migration to AWS, and the London Stock Exchange which, after Microsoft bought a stake in the exchange, began migrating to Azure.
