AI data center startup Fluidstack in talks for $1 billion round, valued at $18 billion months after hitting $7.5 billion, report says | TechCrunch

Fluidstack, a startup that builds specialized data centers for AI companies, is in talks to raise a $1 billion seed round at an $18 billion valuation, potentially led by Jane Street, Bloomberg reports.

If this deal goes through, it would more than double Fluidstack’s valuation in just a few months.

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

Discussions were apparently still underway for this round in February, at least with Google, which was considering investing $100 million in this round, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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

The deal was a huge vote of confidence for Fluidstack, a relatively unknown company in the United States. Anthropic primarily uses AWS and Google Cloud to serve Claude (although it also has a partnership with Microsoft to provide Claude to that software giant’s customers). But just like its 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 spun out of Oxford and was a rising star on the European AI scene – moved its headquarters from the UK to New York. Last month he also withdrew from a Key 10 billion euro AI project in FranceBloomberg reported, to focus on U.S. opportunities.

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

Fluidstack did not respond to a request for comment.