Fluidstack, the AI data center startup spun out of Oxford University, is reportedly in talks to raise one billion dollars at a valuation of eighteen billion dollars, according to Bloomberg. The round is said to be potentially co-led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, the AGI-focused investment fund started by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, with Morgan Stanley advising on the transaction. If the deal closes at those terms, it would represent a remarkable acceleration for a company that was valued at just 7.5 billion dollars only a few months ago.
Fluidstack, the AI data center startup spun out of Oxford University, is reportedly in talks to raise one billion dollars at a valuation of eighteen billion dollars, according to Bloomberg. The round is said to be potentially co-led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, the AGI-focused investment fund started by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, with Morgan Stanley advising on the transaction. If the deal closes at those terms, it would represent a remarkable acceleration for a company that was valued at just 7.5 billion dollars only a few months ago, when it was raising around 700 million dollars in an earlier round.
That earlier round attracted backing from some prominent names, including the Collison brothers of Stripe, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and AI investor Daniel Gross. Google was also reported to be considering a 100 million dollar contribution to that round, though no formal announcement ever came. The pace at which Fluidstack's valuation has grown reflects a broader shift in how investors are thinking about AI infrastructure, where specialized compute capacity has become one of the most fiercely contested resources in the technology industry.
Much of the excitement around Fluidstack traces back to a landmark deal it signed with Anthropic in late 2025. The two companies agreed to a fifty billion dollar partnership under which Fluidstack would build custom data centers in Texas and New York tailored specifically for Anthropic's needs. The deal was significant enough that Fluidstack relocated its headquarters from the United Kingdom to New York to better position itself for the US market. Around the same time, the company pulled out of a ten billion euro AI infrastructure project in France, choosing instead to concentrate on opportunities closer to its new American base.
Beyond Anthropic, the company has assembled a notable client roster that includes Meta, Poolside, and Black Forest Labs, among others. Before the Anthropic deal brought it into wider focus, Fluidstack was perhaps best known in AI circles for providing computing infrastructure to European AI lab Mistral. The company operates as part of a new generation of so-called neoclouds, startups that lease high-performance GPU capacity to organizations building demanding AI models and workloads, rather than offering the kind of general-purpose cloud services associated with Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.
The MENA region is watching the rise of specialized AI infrastructure companies like Fluidstack with more than passing interest. The UAE is building a massive AI data center cluster as part of a Stargate project, backed by OpenAI, Nvidia, and other US companies, with Abu Dhabi's state-supported G42 playing a central role. That project, expected to go live in 2026, spans a ten-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi and is designed to host up to 500,000 Nvidia chips annually, powered by five gigawatts of energy. Saudi Arabia is equally aggressive, with its Public Investment Fund backing the Humain AI initiative and deepening a ten billion dollar partnership with Google Cloud to build a sovereign AI hub in the kingdom. Sovereign investors in the Gulf deployed sixty-six billion dollars into AI and digitalization last year alone, with Middle East funds leading globally, making the region one of the most active backers of exactly the kind of specialized compute infrastructure Fluidstack is building. As Gulf states race to establish themselves as global AI hubs, the demand for purpose-built data center capacity from credible global operators is only intensifying, and that dynamic is directly fueling the investor appetite behind Fluidstack's latest round.
The broader neocloud sector has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current AI investment cycle. Major technology companies have poured billions into these infrastructure firms to secure future computing access as scarcity in high-performance GPU capacity grows. Fluidstack has shown particular creativity in how it structures those arrangements, partnering with crypto miners TeraWulf and Cipher Mining to build data centers backed by debt financing, with Google acting as a guarantor in case Fluidstack falls short of its obligations. It is an unconventional financing model, but one that signals just how much leverage a company with the right customers and a credible build-out plan can command right now.
