Jane Street and Situational Awareness are in discussions to co-lead the round, Bloomberg reports. The Oxford-founded neocloud, which relocated from the UK to the US after landing a $50 billion data centre partnership with Anthropic, has grown its revenue from $1.8M in 2022 to $66.2M in 2024.
FluidStack, the AI data centre startup that builds compute infrastructure specifically for AI companies, is in talks to raise approximately $1 billion at a target valuation of $18 billion, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people briefed on the matter.
Trading firm Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an AGI-focused fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner and backed by the Collison brothers, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and investor Daniel Gross, are in discussions to co-lead the round. Morgan Stanley is advising on the investment.
The $18 billion target valuation would represent a more than doubling of the company’s worth in a matter of months. In December 2025, Bloomberg reported that FluidStack was in discussions to raise around $700 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, in a round said to be led by Situational Awareness; that round did not formally close or receive public confirmation.
The new talks suggest the company’s negotiating position has strengthened considerably since then, almost certainly because of the $50 billion data centre partnership it signed with Anthropic in November 2025.
That Anthropic deal, to build custom facilities in Texas and New York, designed specifically to maximise efficiency for Anthropic’s Claude AI workloads, with sites coming online throughout 2026, was the largest infrastructure commitment Anthropic had made independently from cloud providers such as AWS and Google.
It represented a defining moment for FluidStack, an Oxford-founded neocloud that had been a notable but relatively unknown presence in European AI infrastructure before the deal.
Following its signing, the company relocated its headquarters from the UK to the United States.
FluidStack was founded in 2017 as a spin-off from Oxford University and pivoted aggressively towards AI compute infrastructure following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Revenue grew from $1.8 million in 2022 to $66.2 million in 2024 as the company built out capacity for AI customers. It manages more than 100,000 GPUs and counts Anthropic, Meta, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, and France’s Mistral among its customers.
A $200 million Series A in February 2025 accelerated the company’s expansion. In early 2025, it was also named the primary partner for a one-gigawatt AI infrastructure project backed by the French government, representing more than $11 billion in spending.
Two 10-year hosting agreements with TeraWulf totalling $6.7 billion in contracted revenue are set to begin in 2026. The new round, if it closes, would position FluidStack among the most valuable AI infrastructure companies outside the hyperscaler tier.
The valuation trajectory, from startup to $18 billion in under a decade, reflects the intensity of demand for bespoke AI compute at a moment when frontier AI labs are racing to secure infrastructure that hyperscalers cannot build fast enough or customise sufficiently for specific workloads.
Unlike general-purpose cloud providers, FluidStack builds data centres optimised for the training and inference patterns of specific AI systems, giving customers more control over cost and performance than rack rental from AWS or Google Cloud provides.
