Yahoo Finance Bloomberg eyes more data centres as it ramps up AI capability
Bloomberg is eyeing many more data centres as the tech giant seeks to ramp up its compute capacity ahead of the introduction of new AI capabilities.
The New York based firm, which has European headquarters in London and whose financial terminals are popular with City traders, has unveiled a string of new AI tools in a bid to upgrade the software’s functionality.
“We’re definitely building more data centres,” Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards told the Standard.
“We’re buying tons and tons of the latest GPU systems and building them up as fast as we possibly can.
“Really what’s to change now is we have to build them liquid cooled instead of air cooled. These GPUs and systems are very different from tradition compute, they’re much more dense and they’re much more power hungry.
“It’s an intense capital spend but it’s something we’ve been doing for a long time.”
Among the new AI-powered tools being introduced are improved search functionality that is better able to crawl the millions of financial documents archived in the terminal to retrieve more accurate answers, as well as natural language-based commands to supplement the network of three and four-letter monikers which users are often required to learn by heard, to make the terminal more navigable.
“The nature of data is it’s increasing exponentially and humans just can’t keep up with all their data. We need to build the systems to make it easier for them,” Edwards said.
“But we also want to be able to allow people to do insightful research and insightful model building that they can use for their investment thesis and their investment processes.”
The firm’s European headquarters in London is now home to around 1600 software engineers, a jump of 45% over the past 3 years.
It has more than 300 AI research scientists and engineers globally, of which more than 80 are based in London. Bloomberg said it continues to hire more AI engineers in London and has also collaborated on research with academics at universities including Edinburgh, UCL, Imperial and University of Glasgow.
