AI data center startup Fluidstack is in talks for a $1 billion round at an $18 billion valuation, months after hitting $7.5 billion, report says

Fluidstack, a startup building specialized data centers for AI companies, is in talks to raise as much as $1 billion in funding at a valuation of $18 billion, possibly led by Jane Street, Bloomberg reported.

If this deal goes through, Fluidstack’s value will more than double within a few months.

In December, the company reportedly raised about $700 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, but did not formally announce the close of the round, sources told Bloomberg at the time. The round was reportedly led by Situational Awareness, an AGI-focused fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner and backed by Stripe’s Collison brothers, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and AI investor and entrepreneur Daniel Gross.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that negotiations for this round still appear to be ongoing in February with Google, which is considering investing at least $100 million in this round.

The hype around Fluidstack is for good reason. Last November, Anthropic announced a $50 billion deal with a startup to build custom-designed data centers in Texas and New York. Unlike hyperscalers like AWS that cater to all kinds of computing needs, Fluidstack’s infrastructure is built specifically for AI.

This deal was a huge vote of confidence for Fluidstack, a relatively unknown company in the U.S. Anthropic. It primarily uses AWS and Google Cloud to serve Claude (but it also has a partnership with Microsoft to offer Claude to the software giant’s customers). But like rival OpenAI, Anthropic is growing so fast it needs more capacity, and this deal gives Anthropic more control over its own cloud infrastructure.

The partnership is significant for the startup, which moved its headquarters from the UK to New York after Fluidstack was a rising star on the European AI scene, spun out of Oxford. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the company had pulled out of a major €10 billion AI project in France to focus on US opportunities.

In addition to Anthropic, our customers include Meta, Poolside, and Black Forest Labs. Before the Anthropic deal, Fluidstack was probably best known for providing infrastructure to Mistral.

Fluidstack did not respond to a request for comment.