Jump Trading hires Itô founders to run a new compute trading desk

Jump Trading has hired the entire founding team of Itô, a startup built around trading access to computing power. The team will launch and run a new compute trading desk at the firm. Itô co-founder Affaan announced the move in a social media post on October 12, 2026. What Jump is actually buying Itô’s specialty is trading access to computing power and AI inference capacity. Inference is the work an AI model does after it’s trained, answering prompts and generating output. The new desk will start with mid-market contracts. These deals mostly run for 3 to 5 years. Contract sizes in this segment typically span tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, with some reaching the low hundreds of millions. Early trading activity shows that approximately 30% of these mid-market contracts require upfront payments. Buyers are being asked to put real cash down before the compute is delivered. Why the Itô team picked Jump The Itô founders, including co-founder Alejandro, have hands-on experience commercializing computational resources. They previously built a platform aimed at helping buyers secure AI compute supply. Their background also spans credit products and supercomputing. Accor...