XTX founder's net worth reaches £16 billion, making markets with AI compute

[[**XTX founder Gerko ranks eighth on the 2026 UK Rich List with a fortune of £16.006 billion, up 64.3 billion yuan in a year; the company has only 300 people, generates over 100 million yuan in revenue per employee, and has become a global top market maker through AI computing power.**

**Key points**

**1. A small team achieves extremely high revenue efficiency**

XTX has about 300 employees. In 2025, the three UK entities had total revenue of about £3.93 billion (about 35 billion yuan), with revenue per employee exceeding 100 million yuan; daily trading volume is about $250 billion.

**2. The FX track and talent helped it enter market making**

When XTX was founded in 2015, it chose the FX market, where market-making penetration was relatively low, leveraging London's position as a trading center and the arrival of former Deutsche Bank global head of FX; its FX ranking surpassed Deutsche Bank.

**3. Heavy spending on self-built AI computing power improves trading capability**

XTX stores 400PB of data on a supercomputer in Iceland, spent more than £150 million on 25,000 AI chips, and uses machine learning to predict prices of more than 53,000 financial instruments; it was founded in the same year as High-Flyer Quant and likewise spent heavily to build computing power.

**4. The billionaire's influence spills over, and the industry enters a computing-power race**

Gerko ranks eighth in the UK and has topped the taxpaying list; he has invested in Anthropic and others and donated to mathematics education; XTX plans to invest more than €1 billion to build five data centers in Finland, while peers such as Jane Street are also stepping up AI infrastructure. 2026-10-24 15:08 Britain's "Liang Wenfeng" rakes in 64 billion, China Venture quick read

In the 2026 UK Rich List recently published by The Sunday Times, Alex Gerko, known as "the mathematician," ranks eighth with a fortune of £16.006 billion (about 141.7 billion yuan).

According to the list's estimates, this British billionaire's fortune rose by £7.261 billion (about 64.3 billion yuan) in a year. By that calculation, Gerko's assets increased by an average of £19.89 million (about 176 million yuan) per day.

What underpins this fortune is XTX, the quantitative trading company Gerko founded. XTX has now joined the ranks of global top market makers and is one of Britain's most profitable private companies. A set of efficiency figures proves its money-making efficiency: the company currently has only 300 employees, yet revenue per employee exceeds 100 million.

As a new-generation quantitative trading company, XTX was founded in 2015, the same year as Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer Quant, and its money-burning approach to AI computing power is exactly the same. According to a 2024 Financial Times report, XTX's research work is carried out by a supercomputer located in Iceland, and to that end XTX spent more than £150 million (over 1.3 billion yuan) on 25,000 AI chips.

Gerko was born in Moscow in 1979. He earned a PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University, Russia's most prestigious university, and also a master's degree in economics from the private New Economic School.

With such an educational background, staying in academia would seem the most natural path, but Gerko turned to financial markets instead. In one report, the Financial Times attributed Gerko's career choice to frustration in academia:

After obtaining his PhD in mathematics in Moscow, Gerko concluded that he could not become a world-class intellectual.

In 2004, the frustrated Dr. Gerko joined Deutsche Bank. Later, Gerko joined the British quantitative hedge fund GSA Capital and set up its FX trading division, and subsequently took charge of other asset management. In 2015, Gerko, who had already spent more than 10 years in the financial world, founded XTX with a small group of traders. The name "XTX" comes from a mathematical formula used in linear regression, echoing Gerko's professional background.

XTX's business model is similar to well-known market makers such as Citadel Securities and Jane Street: providing quotes to clients worldwide and earning profits from bid-ask spreads, accumulating small gains across massive trading volume. According to its official website, XTX uses machine learning to predict prices of more than 53,000 financial instruments, including equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and cryptocurrencies, and then trades based on the results.

To date, XTX's daily trading volume is about $250 billion. According to UK Companies House filings, in 2025 the total revenue of XTX's three main UK operating entities was about £3.93 billion (about 35 billion yuan).

Looking only at revenue scale, XTX still lags several positions behind top US market makers: Jane Street's net trading revenue in 2025 was about $39.6 billion (about 265 billion yuan), and XTX's revenue is less than one-seventh of that. Citadel Securities' 2025 revenue was nearly 90 billion yuan.

But in terms of money-making efficiency, even Jane Street, which dominates Wall Street, cannot match XTX. Jane Street currently has more than 3,000 employees; based on 2025 revenue, its revenue per employee is about $13.2 million (over 88 million yuan). XTX currently has about 300 employees, with revenue per employee exceeding 100 million yuan. There is also a major precondition here: Jane Street was founded 26 years ago, while XTX was founded only 11 years ago.

The question is, as a latecomer in the quantitative market, how did XTX overtake against the odds?

There are two keys: choosing the right track, and then spending heavily on equipment.

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In the early stage of the business, XTX chose the foreign exchange market, where market makers had not yet penetrated deeply. This was a case of adapting to local conditions: when XTX was founded, its U.S. peers had long been firmly established in the stock and options markets, while the center of global foreign exchange trading happened to be in London. In addition, after the 2008 financial crisis, foreign exchange trading accelerated its shift from large banks to specialized trading firms, and XTX caught the tailwind.

At the same time, XTX co-founder and co-CEO Zar Amrolia was formerly Deutsche Bank's global head of foreign exchange. According to Bloomberg, less than a year after he joined, XTX surpassed Deutsche Bank in Euromoney's ranking of global foreign exchange spot dealers.

Once the track was chosen, the next step was to equip itself—XTX mainly relies on spending heavily to build its own AI computing power, using machine learning and neural network models to trade.

Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer Quant has long been widely known in China for spending heavily to build AI: in 2020 and 2021, High-Flyer Quant invested nearly 1.2 billion yuan in building its own AI cluster to provide computing power support for research.

As Liang Wenfeng's British counterpart, Gerko's investment in computing power is equally striking. According to a 2024 Financial Times report, XTX's research work is mainly carried out by a supercomputer located in Iceland. This supercomputer can store 400 PB of data, equivalent to about 80 trillion digital photos. To achieve this, XTX has spent more than 150 million pounds (over 1.3 billion yuan) on 25,000 AI chips. Most of these chips come from Nvidia, which has also made XTX one of Nvidia's major customers.

The quantitative trading circle kicks off an arms race

XTX's business development has made founder Gerko a regular on the British rich list.

In 2023, Gerko topped The Sunday Times Tax List for the first time, with an estimated tax payment of 487.4 million pounds (about 4.3 billion yuan), becoming Britain's largest taxpayer. By 2024, he retained the top spot with a tax payment equivalent to more than 6 billion yuan. In the rich list published by The Sunday Times this year, Gerko ranked 8th in the UK with a fortune of more than 140 billion yuan.

After becoming wealthy, Gerko also followed the advanced path of many rich people, becoming an investor and philanthropist.

According to its official website, XTX's invested projects include Anthropic, AI chip company Groq, and autonomous driving company Wayve, among other popular tech companies.

In philanthropy, Gerko continues to invest in mathematics education and basic research. In 2023, he donated 1 million pounds to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France. This research institution is also where Wang Hong, winner of the 2026 Fields Medal, works. In mathematics education, Gerko and his wife also funded the founding of 1729 Maths School. This specialized mathematics school in north London enrolls mathematically talented students aged 11 to 18 and provides full or partial bursaries to students in need.

A mathematics PhD entering quantitative investment and a fortune of hundreds of billions devoted to philanthropy—the labels attached to Gerko easily bring to mind the father of quantitative investment, James Simons.

After earning a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, Simons taught at MIT and Harvard. At age 30, he became chairman of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University. He also co-proposed with the renowned Chinese-American mathematician Chern Shiing-shen the mathematical framework later known as Chern-Simons theory. In 1978, at age 40, Simons left academia and founded the quantitative investment company Renaissance Technologies.

Unlike traditional investment methods that rely on analyzing company fundamentals and judging corporate value, the quantitative investment model pioneered by Simons mainly analyzes macroeconomic data, market behavior, corporate financial data, and more, and uses mathematical models and algorithms to form automated trading strategies. In 2024, when Simons died, his fortune reached $31.4 billion (about 210 billion yuan). According to Forbes estimates, Simons donated about $6 billion (about 40 billion yuan) over his lifetime to research in basic mathematics and physics, autism, and neuroscience.

However, compared with the era when Simons started his business, the quantitative investment industry in which Gerko operates has long entered another stage of competition.

Although today's leading quantitative trading firms still regard mathematics, physics, and computer talent as their core competitiveness, just as Renaissance Technologies did when it was founded, after the GPT moment, in addition to smart brains, the competitive chips among leading firms in this industry—which measures in microseconds and relies on models to predict the market—also include AI capabilities and computing power reserves.

After aggressively spending on chips, XTX's investment in AI has also extended to infrastructure. In 2025, XTX announced plans to invest more than 1 billion euros to build five data centers in Finland. The first data center is scheduled to open this year and will cover an area equivalent to three football fields.

And XTX's peers are likewise stepping up AI infrastructure this year.

In April 2026, Jane Street invested $1 billion in AI cloud service provider CoreWeave and committed to spending approximately $6 billion in the future to use its AI cloud platform, obtaining next-generation computing resources including NVIDIA Vera Rubin technology. Jane Street has also been reported to be planning to build its own data centers. Other quantitative trading firms have made similar increased commitments: Jump Trading already owns three large research data centers; QRT has deployed high-density computing resources through a partnership with Icelandic data center operator atNorth.

By betting on AI computing power for trading, Gerko has built a fortune in the hundreds of billions. And on the AI wealth-creation conveyor belt, the next billionaire may already be on the way. Channel: Finance and Economics This content comes from the internet; original link. The views represent only the author and do not represent the position of Huxiu. For copyright issues, please contact hezuo@huxiu.com, and we will verify and handle it promptly. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP[ ]