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

Fluidstack, a startup that builds specialized data centers for artificial intelligence companies, is in talks to raise a $1 billion round at an $18 billion valuation, possibly led by Jane Street, Bloomberg exhibitions.

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

In December, the company reportedly raised about $700 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, sources said Bloomberg at the time, although he did not officially announce the closure of this round. This round is said to be 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.

Talks were apparently still ongoing for that round in February, at least with Google, which was considering putting up $100 million in the round, the Wall Street Journal reported.

There is good reason for the hype surrounding Fluidstack. In November, Anthropic announced that it had signed a $50 billion deal with the startup to build purpose-built data centers in Texas and New York. Unlike hyperscalers like AWS, which serve all kinds of computing needs, Fluidstack’s infrastructure is built specifically for AI.

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

This partnership is so important to the startup that Fluidstack — which started in Oxford and was a rising star on the European AI scene — moved its headquarters from the UK to New York. Last month, he also retired from a major €10 billion artificial intelligence project in FranceBloomberg reported, to focus on U.S. opportunities.

In addition to Anthropic, it counts Meta, Poolside, Black Forest Labs and others as clients. Before the deal with Anthropic, Fluidstack was perhaps best known for provisioning infrastructure in Mistral.

Fluidstack did not respond to a request for comment.