ANALYSIS: ICE expects AI to buoy energy trading ‘over next decade’
31st October, 2025|Radi Khasawneh
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) sees power demand from artificial intelligence (AI) use driving demand in its energy complex, as the US group refines its own trading strategy after reviewing systems.
“In our energy markets, the macro AI and data centre expansion trend is expected to drive significant energy demand over the next decade,” Ben Jackson (pictured) said on a call with analysts. “We believe our trading and clearing platform, which offers deep liquidity and price transparency across the full energy spectrum is uniquely positioned to support customers.
“Despite lower overall market volatility, the third quarter of this year was the second strongest third quarter in our history following the record quarter of a year ago.”
The US group's exchanges returned $1.3 billion (£989 million) in the third quarter, flat on the same period of 2024 on a constant currency basis. The energy segment brought in $482 million, also flat on the third quarter last year, reflecting a 2% dip in average daily volume (ADV) of energy derivatives.
But October has seen a 17% increase in energy ADV across futures and options, according to ICE’s results presentation.
The comments reflect those of Deutsche Boerse, which reported a 10% increase in revenue from its commodity business in the third quarter. The chief executive of the European exchange estimated European power demand could increase by as much as 15% due to AI data centre consumption.
ICE earlier this month sealed a $2 billion investment in prediction market Polymarket. Speaking about the deal, Jackson said the exchange has already moved to add Polymarket data to its sentiment analysis tools for clients.
“Demonstrating the new innovation under way across ICE, we are utilising AI with our new sentiment indicator datasets – including Reddit, Dow Jones and soon Polymarket - with Google and Meta AI models helping to process these datasets and identify patterns,” he added. “While still in the development stage, these datasets are particularly attractive to market participants seeking an edge through differentiated data inputs.
“This illustrates how our proprietary dataset is set to become increasingly vital to a trading community reliant on models to support trading decisions.”
ICE chair and chief executive Jeffrey Sprecher said Polymarket data will be a key part of an overhaul of AI tools at the exchange.
“As the leader in non-sports prediction markets, Polymarket provides real-time probabilities on events like elections, economic indicators and cultural trends,” Sprecher said. “Offering a powerful new layer of insight and supporting more informed decision making, we believe that we can accelerate Polymarket’s acceptance into the traditional financial system by virtue of our distribution, understanding and long-time customer relationships.
“And we believe Polymarket’s engineering team can help ICE’s engineers better understand our own adoption of evolving banking technology – a relationship that is already paying dividends to both of us.”
One example of that is the use of Polymarket smart contracts and blockchain-based settlement to revamp clearing and collateral systems, Sprecher said.
“The current regulatory environment is being confronted by collateral management using tokens, which I believe will help evolve regulatory rulemaking to take advantage of 24 by 7 capital movement,” he added. “And ICE intends to be at the forefront of driving this evolution given our own use case of operating six global clearing houses with differing collateral and regulatory environments.
“Such an evolution can make global clearing and trade settlement more efficient, and we have seen that the efficient use of collateral typically results in increased trading volumes and transaction revenues.”
The exchange is already in the process of reviewing all workflows to deploy automation and machine learning, and offering services to clients through a business called ICE Aurora.
“We are now taking the next step by combining our pursuit of workflow automation across our business processes with the solutions we provide to our clients through generative and agentic AI under the name of ICE Aurora,” Jackson said.
“As we continue to expand our AI capabilities we are leveraging three core strengths: deep operational and complex workflow expertise, highly differentiated proprietary data – which we believe will only grow in value – and the powerful network effects of our platform.”
