Decade after decade of widely available computing power has triggered significant industry disruptions and an unprecedented technology boom—and has transformed the global economy in the process.
The high-frequency trading firm Citadel Securities, for example, began embedding advanced computing capabilities into its core strategy in the early 2000s, and in turn was able to leverage immense processing power and technologies, such as machine learning, to execute trades in microseconds. Citadel’s ability to rapidly put large amounts of computing power to use have made it the largest retail market-making firm in the U.S., executing over $400 billion in trades per day.
