Jane Street has deposited Sebi's Rs 4,843 crore demand; a tribunal rules October 21 on what it can see

India's markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), told the country's securities appeals court this week that Jane Street made about Rs 4,000 crore trading options, and put the burden on the firm to show its strategy was not manipulation ¹. None of that is adjudicated: the profit number is the regulator's submission↗ ¹.

On October 21 the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) rules on the question that comes first: whether Jane Street gets the investigation file its defense says it needs ²³. The stake runs past Mumbai, because the US trading firm behind those profits also finances the AI buildout, with about $6 billion committed to the cloud company↗ CoreWeave▼−3.14% — CoreWeave, down 3.14 percent today ⁴.

The trades Sebi calls manipulation

On Sebi's telling, Jane Street used purchases in the cash and futures markets to prop up Bank Nifty, an index of large Indian banking stocks, while it built large short positions in the index's options, concentrated on expiry days ²³⁶. The order that started the case↗ came on July 3, 2025 ⁶. Issued without a prior hearing, it barred Jane Street from Indian markets and demanded Rs 4,843 crore in alleged unlawful gains ³.

The firm's senior counsel, Darius Khambata, calls the trades standard global hedging, explained in writing to Sebi and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in August 2024 ⁵. The firm has deposited the money, halted its India trading, and faces what he says is the largest deposit order Sebi has ever issued ⁵.

By some measures, Bank Nifty trading volumes halved in the five sessions after the ban ⁶. Proprietary trading firms of Jane Street's kind supply roughly half of India's options volume, Zerodha's chief executive warned as the ban landed ⁶.

Two earlier reviews found no proof

An NSE review in November 2024 and a December 2024 examination by Sebi's own Integrated Surveillance Department reportedly found no proof that Jane Street's trades influenced index prices; the department proposed dropping the matter ³⁶. Sebi then formed a fresh team and issued its order months later ⁶.

Jane Street wants the trade logs with counterparty detail, the surveillance report and Sebi's correspondence with the exchange ³. Sebi calls the counterparty data irrelevant at this stage, and its counsel says the earlier reviews examined narrow time windows that a later minute-by-minute analysis superseded ¹³⁶. A regulator confident in that analysis loses nothing by opening the file.

The listed exposure runs through CoreWeave

Jane Street lists no shares of its own, so the tradeable end of this story is CoreWeave, the Nasdaq-listed AI cloud provider ⁴. Jane Street added a $1 billion equity stake to its cloud commitment in April ⁴, and on its first-quarter call↗ CoreWeave counted financial-services customers approaching $10 billion of contracted backlog ⁷.

The company carries $35.6 billion of debt while revenue compounds ⁸. Its newest borrowing is secured by the infrastructure and a customer contract behind it, so committed customers sit inside the credit story too ⁸.

The ruling on the file shapes the fight on the merits

The October 21 ruling settles evidence, not guilt; the merits come after ²³. If the tribunal orders disclosure, the defense gets the surveillance report that proposed dropping the matter, the counterparty logs and the Sebi-NSE correspondence Khambata says belongs in his file ³⁵. If it refuses, Jane Street fights the disgorgement with only the excerpts the regulator chose to share ³.

No filing ties the CoreWeave commitment to the India case; the connection is that one balance sheet stands behind both. If the disgorgement survives, that balance sheet is smaller by the deposited sum; if the file opens and the defense holds, the profit engine behind the AI funding keeps running ³⁴. A market the size of India's runs on liquidity providers, and profit at scale is a reason to test such a firm in daylight before treating its gains as unlawful.