CME Group and Google Cloud Announce New Chicago Area Private Cloud Region and Co-location Facility for CME Group's Markets

• Key milestone paves the way for CME Group to migrate to Google Cloud's industry-first specialized platform for capital markets

CHICAGO and SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Reaching a significant milestone in the companies' transformational partnership, CME Group and Google Cloud today announced plans to build a new private Google Cloud region, and a co-location facility, in Aurora, Illinois.

The private Google Cloud region will host Google Cloud's new, industry-first specialized platform designed to support global trading of CME Group's futures and options markets, and offer derivatives traders cloud-based, ultra-low-latency networking, and high-performance computing.

Locating the platform in the new private Google Cloud region in the Chicago area will allow CME Group's clients to utilize existing connectivity options and access points to other global markets. Additionally, CME Group's clients can choose between self-managed infrastructure in the co-location facility or Google Cloud's specialized infrastructure-as-a-service offering, both with equal network latency to the exchange.

The new specialized platform will enable a number of benefits for CME Group's clients, including expanded flexibility, strengthened operational efficiencies, and increased access to cloud services, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, all of which will deepen the value proposition for market users around the globe. For example, CME Group clients will be enabled to rapidly experiment, test, and deploy new strategies without impacting their production trading environments.

"This is a significant step forward in our partnership with Google Cloud that is revolutionizing our industry," said CME Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer 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." 

In addition to the capabilities offered through the new platform, market participants that migrate to the cloud can benefit from Google Cloud's global network and innovative AI and data capabilities. With Google Cloud's data cloud products like BigQuery and AlloyDB, and its AI and machine learning platform, Vertex AI, financial institutions will be able to experiment with new modeling techniques such as time-series forecasting and simplify access to insights with generative AI. All of this is backed by Google Cloud's expanding number of regions, planet-scale network, and AI-powered security.

"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."

Development of the specialized platform is underway, starting with key capabilities available for customer testing in the Dallas Google Cloud region, which will eventually become the disaster recovery facility. Construction of the private Google Cloud region in Aurora is scheduled to begin this year. CME Group expects to provide clients with at least 18 months advance notice before CME Group markets move to the new platform. CME Group cash markets will continue to operate in their current facilities as they do today.

Since announcing their partnership in 2021, CME Group and Google Cloud continue to execute on key initiatives, including recent enhancements to CME Group's cloud-based data platform and migration of critical clearing applications to the cloud. Both firms are focused on delivering significant benefits to all market participants by expanding access, creating real-time, customer-centric data and analytics capabilities, bringing new products and services to market, and increasing efficiencies.

About CME Group

As the world's leading derivatives marketplace, CME Group (www.cmegroup.com) enables clients to trade futures, options, cash and OTC markets, optimize portfolios, and analyze data – empowering market participants worldwide to efficiently manage risk and capture opportunities. CME Group exchanges offer the widest range of global benchmark products across all major asset classes based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural products and metals.  The company offers futures and options on futures trading through the CME Globex platform, fixed income trading via BrokerTec and foreign exchange trading on the EBS platform.  In addition, it operates one of the world's leading central counterparty clearing providers, CME Clearing. 

CME Group, the Globe logo, CME, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Globex, and E-mini are trademarks of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc.  CBOT and Chicago Board of Trade are trademarks of Board of Trade of the City of Chicago, Inc.  NYMEX, New York Mercantile Exchange and ClearPort are trademarks of New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc.  COMEX is a trademark of Commodity Exchange, Inc. BrokerTec is a trademark of BrokerTec Americas LLC and EBS is a trademark of EBS Group LTD. The S&P 500 Index is a product of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC ("S&P DJI"). "S&P®", "S&P 500®", "SPY®", "SPX®", US 500 and The 500 are trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC; Dow Jones®, DJIA® and Dow Jones Industrial Average are service and/or trademarks of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. These trademarks have been licensed for use by Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. Futures contracts based on the S&P 500 Index are not sponsored, endorsed, marketed, or promoted by S&P DJI, and S&P DJI makes no representation regarding the advisability of investing in such products. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

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SOURCE CME Group; Google Cloud