Lambda Secures Cloud Deal with Hudson River Trading for NVIDIA Chips
May 20, 2026 – 12:35 pm
Lambda, an IPO-bound GPU-cloud startup, has added one of the largest US quantitative trading firms to its growing customer list. According to Reuters, Lambda has signed a cloud-infrastructure deal with Hudson River Trading (HRT) to provide access to NVIDIA chips.
This agreement expands Lambda’s reach within the high-frequency-trading sector at a pivotal moment as the company prepares for an IPO in the first half of 2026. HRT joins a prestigious customer roster that already includes Microsoft and NVIDIA itself.
Previously, Lambda announced a significant deal with Microsoft, covering tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, including the GB300 NVL72 systems. NVIDIA also leased back approximately 18,000 GPUs from Lambda for $1.5 billion over four years, solidifying Lambda’s position as the company’s largest single customer.
By adding HRT to its client base, Lambda gains exposure to the latency-sensitive segment of the GPU market, where pricing often exceeds that of model-training workloads. HRT has a well-documented history of utilizing high-end NVIDIA capacity for its algorithmic trading research and trading simulation workloads.
This new deal underscores HRT’s strategic approach to multi-vendor procurement, aiming to avoid capacity bottlenecks at any single hyperscaler during the current GPU allocation crunch. The commercial rationale for HRT is clear, given their substantial trading revenue figures: $6.4 billion in Q1 2026 and $12.3 billion for full-year 2025, according to Bloomberg.
Lambda’s positioning against AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud emphasizes speed to capacity rather than price, with shorter procurement cycles and dedicated allocation as its key differentiators. The HRT win arrives at an opportune time for Lambda, just ahead of its IPO, which is expected in the first half of 2026.
The addition of HRT to Lambda’s customer slide, alongside Microsoft and NVIDIA, enhances the company’s vertical story, diversifying beyond traditional model labs and hyperscaler extensions. The impact of this deal on Lambda’s bookings before the IPO will depend on the contract structure, which remains undisclosed.