What’s being billed as the world’s fastest trading engine has been launched by the Singapore Exchange as part of a $250 million technology investment to strengthen market infrastructure.

SGX’s Reach offers an order of magnitude greater capacity and latency of less than 90 microseconds. It is delivered through Nasdaq OMX’s Genium INET platforms and technology from Hewlett-Packard and other providers.

The goal is to establish a world-class data center for SGX and seamlessly connect trading communities in global financial hubs to Singapore.

“As the leading exchange in Asia connecting international investors to the world’s fastest growing economies and linking Asian investors to international companies, SGX has to constantly improve and innovate,” Chew Sutat, head of sales and clients at SGX, told Markets Media. “In investing in Reach, SGX is looking to enhance market efficiency and thereby increase liquidity and participation levels.”

The new trading infrastructure leverages Voltaire’s InfiniBand switches and software—advanced networking technology used in high-performance data centers—to provide the lowest end-to-end latency in the world, SGX said. The engine will exploit industry-standard hardware platforms and the Linux operating system for lower operating costs.

The $250 million Reach initiative enables SGX to operate, for the first time, a state-of-the-art data center with co-location services, said Chew. Prior to Reach, SGX offered proximity hosting services.

The new SGX data center—a purpose-built facility—will house SGX’s trading, market data and clearing infrastructure and offer a range of co-location facilities.

The Aug. 15 launch of Reach marks the first time SGX is offering market participants an ultra low-latency engine with far more capacity, thereby increasing market efficiency, he said.

From next year, when SGX starts operating points-of-presence at international financial center, global liquidity pools in Chicago, London, New York and Tokyo will be able to more easily and economically connect to SGX markets.