Ice moves to meet demand for greater cloud, AI capabilities

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has created an internal research and development department to explore artificial intelligence use cases, CEO Jeffrey Sprecher revealed on the company’s Q1 earnings call, held on Thursday, May 2. In describing how ICE is incorporating artificial intelligence into the business, Sprecher said that like other large corporations, ICE has developers working on how to integrate AI models into existing and future products to improve productivity and efficiency.

“Along those lines, we created an internal R&D group that we’re calling our AI Center of Excellence, where we’re testing novel use cases, and working to build appropriate governance guardrails to reduce or eliminate the risks inherent to AI,” Sprecher said.

When WatersTechnology spoke to Chris Edmonds, president of ICE Fixed Income and Data Services (FIDS) in April, he noted that ICE is positioning itself as a provider of datasets that clients will look to as they deploy generative AI models or predictive analytics at their own firms. “They’re going to need our data at the end of the day in order to drive those models, and we look forward to those conversations,” Edmonds said last month.

During Thursday’s earnings call, Sprecher also spoke about how he believes the company’s decision to manage its own IT infrastructure and make it available to customers directly has created a competitive advantage, leading to increased development of the company’s proprietary cloud.

“Our thesis of using digital networks to connect people and broaden access to risk management pushed us to create and manage our own datacenters and network channels,” he said. “Today, we operate from 14 global datacenters, and we’ve build out the ICE Cloud, a managed network connecting our datacenters to many third-party trading and data venues and interconnecting major players across the global financial services industry.”

One service ICE offers its customers is the ability to use their code and equipment within the ICE global network and transmit the digital output across the ICE-managed cloud. Sprecher said that customer interest in ICE’s artificial intelligence modeling should provide a multi-year tailwind to revenue growth in the firm’s data and connectivity business.

“This strategy has resulted in requests from customers to incorporate their AI models inside our network and is driving increased demand for ICE datacenter and ICE Cloud access,” Sprecher says. “We’ve already received customer deposits for much of our planned year 2025 and 2026 network build-outs, and we’ve been working with our vendors to plan for its continued expansion.”