Electronic trading giant Optiver is building out a new AI Lab
Over the past few years, AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have been unabashed in their pursuit of top young talent from electronic trading and HFT firms. Optiver, an Amsterdam/Chicago based trading giant, has decided two can play at that game.
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Earlier in the year, it launched an AI Lab in Shanghai. It's not clear how large the team is right now, nor when exactly it was founded, but one of its members is Zhou Fang, who joined in February of this year. He's a PhD mathematician who had worked as a deep learning quant for rival trading firm IMC in Chicago for five months after graduating. He describes himself as a founding member of the lab but is understood not to be in charge.
The Shanghai lab has job openings for both a machine learning engineer and an AI researcher; listings call the AI Lab a "newly established team [which] will operate independently from our core trading operations" to apply "advanced AI and machine learning technologies to complex problems." Optiver is looking for people with "startup mindset but Big Tech rigor."
There's precedent for spinning an AI lab out of a trading firm in China. Deepseek was founded by Liang Wenfeng, founder of Chinese quant fund High-Flyer, who used the fund's profits to finance his AI research. Optiver should have plenty of money to fund the lab after its primary business saw a lot of success in 2025; its annual review published last week said that net trading revenue was up by over €1bn ($1.17bn).
Seemingly happy with the results so far, Optiver is building out a team for its AI lab in the US. This week, Andrew Arnold announced he was joining the firm as its head of research for the AI lab in New York. He's an adjunct machine learning professor at NYU and was most recently a principal applied machine learning engineer for eCommerce firm Shopify.
Arnold was also previously a machine learning researcher at Google. He was also previously a portfolio manager at Cubist, the systematic arm of hedge fund Point72, and was the chief technology officer of hedge fund Trexquant.
Optiver did not respond to a request for comment.
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