• Nasdaq and AWS have announced a multi-year partnership to build the next generation of cloud-enabled infrastructure for the world’s capital markets.
• Beginning in 2022, Nasdaq plans to migrate its North American markets to AWS in a phased approach, starting with Nasdaq MRX, a U.S. options market.
• Nasdaq will use a new edge computing solution that is co-designed by Nasdaq and AWS and specifically developed for market infrastructure. This solution may also be used by other market infrastructure operators and market participants to move their trading systems to the cloud.
• Core to Nasdaq’s move to AWS will be AWS Outposts, which extend AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Nasdaq plans to incorporate AWS Outposts directly into its core network to deliver ultra-low-latency edge compute capabilities from its primary data center in Carteret, NJ.
• This co-designed edge computing solution would effectively establish Nasdaq’s data center as the first-ever private AWS Local Zone for the capital markets industry.
• In addition, the partnership will include opportunities to explore new ways to leverage AWS’s cloud capabilities across Nasdaq’s anti-financial crime, data and analytics, and market infrastructure software solutions.  
• For the 130+ market infrastructure clients – spanning exchanges, banks, clearing houses, central securities depositories and regulators – that rely upon Nasdaq for their core trading, clearing, settlement, and surveillance technology today, Nasdaq plans to partner with AWS to develop viable cloud choices that include public-cloud and hybrid models.
• Nasdaq also intends to leverage its cloud journey for its own markets, coupled with the growing number of AWS Local Zones around the world, and the collective technology portfolios of the partnership, to create a migration blueprint for its market technology clients using a combination of public cloud and edge compute options.

• Moving markets to the cloud is the next milestone on a journey we began a decade ago, and a natural extension of the evolution of our infrastructure to continually advance and improve as a critical part of the economies we serve.
• The global pandemic has provided the confidence and conviction to pursue our Markets cloud journey at an accelerated pace:
  • Our data volumes hit new peaks overnight: 60B messages through our market systems; 122B+ records into our Nasdaq Data Warehouse, up from an average of 70M/day.
  • The cloud enabled us to provision the additional capacity needed at a critical time without impacting other workloads critical to our day-to-day operations.
  • The new normal is an ultra-high-volume environment that has had various volatile periods. We need the on-demand scale, elasticity and flexibility to address an evolving market environment.
• After spending a decade gradually and systematically moving our foundational data and surrounding systems to the cloud in a safe, reliable and controlled way, we are ready to address the key remaining infrastructure in moving critical trading workloads to the cloud.
  • AWS Outposts and the Private Local Zone advancements have made it possible to address critical workload without impacting client experience.

We believe that our customers will get the best of Nasdaq and AWS:

• Nasdaq brings our expertise in developing and delivering highly technical solutions which cater to ultra-low latency, deterministic and high-performance workloads subject to regulation in a secure and fully redundant environment
• AWS brings the scale, efficiency and agility benefits of cloud operating models along with the ability to customize cloud environments to meet the needs of enterprises in many highly regulated industries and global distribution through their data center network.

If you are a current Nasdaq client and have questions about this announcement, please contact your account manager or email sales@nasdaq.com.