Fluidstack, a British company that began in 2017 by helping gamers rent out their graphics cards to AI researchers, has raised a previously undisclosed $1.5 billion at a valuation above $18 billion. The round was led by the quant fund Jane Street. The money does not buy chips. Fluidstack buys neither GPUs nor accelerators of any kind; it builds the buildings they sit in and rents out the space. That model has made it the physical layer of Google's attempt to sell its Tensor Processing Units as a real alternative to Nvidia.
Google has run TPUs for more than a decade, in self-driving cars, in YouTube's machine learning systems and in search, and for most of that time it rented the capacity out through Google Cloud. Now it sells the chips directly. In October 2025 Anthropic agreed to buy up to 1 million TPUs to build and run the next generation of Claude — the first large publicly announced TPU sale Google has made. Google's fastest-growing segment sits on a $514 billion order backlog, and the company's market capitalisation has reached $4 trillion. Morgan Stanley expects chip sales alone to bring Google $13 billion as soon as next year.
Selling the chips was the easy part. Financing their deployment was not. According to people familiar with it, Google built a $200 billion structure to fund the TPU rollout at Anthropic and took a significant stake in it, bringing in Blackstone, Apollo, Morgan Stanley and the chipmaker Broadcom. The Financial Times reported the structure first.
Fluidstack sits in the middle of these arrangements. It signs multibillion-dollar, ten-year deals for surplus power from struggling crypto miners, and those contracts are backed by Google guarantees. In November Anthropic said it would put $50 billion into new data centres that Fluidstack will build — roughly what 1 GW of compute capacity costs. By constructing the sites that will hold Anthropic's 1 million TPUs, Fluidstack has apparently become the first publicly known operator of TPU data centres outside Google itself.
Google confirmed that Anthropic remains the only publicly named customer running TPUs in its own data centres. Anthropic, for its part, says it is diversifying: it uses hardware from Google, Nvidia, AMD and AWS, and is developing a custom chip of its own. Fluidstack declined to comment.
An investment memorandum shared by one of Fluidstack's venture backers puts the company at up to 1.3 GW across more than ten sites this year, revenue rising to $660 million in 2026 from $200 million the year before, and more than 17 GW under management by 2030. Jefferies reckons that last figure would exceed the entire current US data centre capacity of Amazon and Microsoft combined.
Those numbers place Fluidstack against a peer group it does not resemble. Nebius, a listed neocloud, carries a market capitalisation of $57.4 billion and planned to bring 1 GW of AI data centres online in 2026. CoreWeave is valued at $47 billion and has said it would expand its power base to 1.5 GW by year-end. Both mostly buy Nvidia GPUs and rent them out. Fluidstack expects to grow faster precisely because it does not: it builds the halls and leases the space without ever paying for an accelerator. If it does reach 1.3 GW this year, it passes Nebius on capacity while holding a fraction of the inventory risk.
The speed is the product. The memorandum claims Fluidstack can build a data centre in three months, against at least a year for Google, Amazon or Meta. A person close to the company says it simplified the design and made build time the priority, an approach compared to how Elon Musk ran the construction of the Colossus data centre in Tennessee. Over the past year, LinkedIn profiles show, Fluidstack has hired more than a dozen former Tesla and SpaceX employees. In June it quietly leased two buildings totalling over 1 million square feet on the edge of Glendale, Arizona, and it is hiring dozens of people with manufacturing and robotic welding experience to build modular data centre blocks that can be hauled to remote sites on trailers. One new site is going up about 80 miles west of Abilene, Texas. The company is also recruiting people to build and run utility-scale solar plants — a hedge against congested grids, as concern grows in the US that individual states cannot carry the number of data centres under construction, a situation that has already produced a broad backlash.
Alex Bouzari, chief executive and co-founder of the AI storage supplier DDN, credits the founders' ability to scale data centres quickly and work to tight deadlines for the meetings and contracts they have won from large Silicon Valley companies. Fluidstack also offers startups a hands-on service, helping configure and maintain AI chip clusters that can be unstable. For researchers accustomed to Nvidia and its CUDA software library, that help matters; for TPUs it matters more, because outside Google's own AI labs few engineers have worked with the chips and less software infrastructure exists around them.
Improving frontier LLM training with DDN — Cesar Maclary, FluidStack
Source: forbes.com
None of this looked likely for most of the company's life. Jamie Cox read classics at Oxford, where he met the economics student Gary Wu; they founded Fluidstack in 2017, and a year later Cox dropped out for a Thiel Fellowship. In a 2024 YouTube talk, Cesar Maclary — who worked on aerodynamics for a Formula 1 team before joining in 2020 — described the two unmet needs the founders saw: graduate-student friends who could not get compute from the big clouds, and cloud gaming enthusiasts who used their powerful rigs only two or three evenings a week. Progress was slow. In 2020 Cox and Wu launched Treecard, a cashback card meant to fund tree planting, and investors initially preferred it: Treecard had raised more than $30 million by 2022. It was shut down in April 2026. Fluidstack, meanwhile, moved during the pandemic to renting whole blocks of GPUs from corporate and university labs, later signing Poolside, Mistral and Character.ai. After ChatGPT launched it began operating AI supercomputers with clusters of thousands of GPUs inside other companies' data centres. Revenue passed $66 million in 2024, the last year it disclosed figures in UK corporate filings.
By February 2025 it had become an unexpected guest at the AI action summit convened by Emmanuel Macron, who announced that Fluidstack would help build an $11.5 billion data centre in France. Maclary told the Wall Street Journal that Nvidia had promised to supply chips as needed, and later that year he and Wu were photographed with Jensen Huang at Nvidia's annual conference in California, where Huang signed a Lego model of one of his AI chips. About a year later Fluidstack reportedly walked away from the French project; a person close to the company said the US offered more power in less time. By then it was already in conversation with Anthropic and Google, both of whom needed data centres in a hurry after Claude's coding ability turned the model into a hit.
The first visible trace of the Google relationship appeared in SEC filings made from August of last year by three struggling crypto miners. Fluidstack began signing multibillion-dollar ten-year power agreements with TeraWulf, Cipher Mining and Hut 8 — at a point when, as of December 2024, it had formally raised only $30 million in equity and $38 million in debt. The filings name Google as the party providing multibillion-dollar guarantees. Together the deals give Fluidstack just under 1 GW. Anthropic, announcing its own agreement in November, pointed to Fluidstack's flexibility and its ability to deliver gigawatts quickly. Alongside Anthropic, the named clients include Meta, Jane Street and Black Forest Labs. New hires are told the company wants 50 GW secured by 2030; one job posting sets the goal of signing more capacity this decade than any other player in the market, and offers candidates the chance to run infrastructure on the scale of a G7 country rather than a single site.
The cap table has grown to match. Corporate ownership filings list BlackRock, Gavin Baker's hedge fund Atreides Management and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst; several people say Alphabet and Spark Capital, an early Anthropic investor, are also in. Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness, which led July's $750 million round at a $7.5 billion valuation, is now among the largest shareholders, with a stake estimated around $2 billion. Aschenbrenner reportedly also holds roughly $5 billion of Anthropic and is married to Dario Amodei's chief of staff. He has been reported to be under SEC investigation over a $35 billion loss on leveraged trades in AI-linked stocks, after which his hedge fund portfolio was sold to Citadel in July; he has reportedly kept funding startups regardless. People around him got Fluidstack stock too, including the chip analyst Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, who reportedly shared a San Francisco office with him. Forbes estimates that a special vehicle named for Patel and SemiAnalysis president Doug O'Laughlin may hold about $140 million of Fluidstack shares. That connection has since become part of a legal fight: SemiAnalysis sued former employee Wei Zhou, fired in January, for breach of contract and disclosure of trade secrets, days before Zhou filed a counterclaim alleging that Patel pushed him to put sensitive Fluidstack TPU data into SemiAnalysis reports — non-public information that, in Zhou's telling, could move Nvidia and Google shares and potentially breach securities law. Both cases went to arbitration. SemiAnalysis and Zhou did not respond to questions; Patel formally declined to comment.
Here is what I think the $18 billion actually prices. Fluidstack had $30 million of equity and $38 million of debt on its books when it started committing to ten-year, multibillion-dollar power contracts. Those commitments were credible because Google guaranteed them. Strip the guarantees out and the company is a fast builder with a good hiring list and no balance sheet; keep them in and the valuation is substantially a claim on Google's credit and on Google's determination to make TPUs a merchant business. Jane Street, which is both an investor and a customer here, is not pricing a data centre developer. It is pricing Google's willingness to keep underwriting one.
The other thing worth staring at is the gap between two numbers the company itself is circulating. The investment memorandum says more than 17 GW by 2030. New employees are told 50 GW by the same year. Those are not variations on a forecast; they are different companies. Nobody in the announcements explains which one the $18 billion is based on, and the more interesting question is what the 33 GW of difference is supposed to be financed with, given that Fluidstack's entire credit story so far runs through one customer's guarantor. What is absent from all of this is any statement of what happens to those guarantees if Google decides the merchant TPU experiment has proven its point.
Also absent from the shareholder register: Nvidia. The $5 trillion chipmaker has spent billions seeding the neocloud generation — CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe and others that resell access to its hardware — and by Forbes's count Fluidstack may be the only neocloud data centre builder it has not funded. That was a free choice while Google was the only one writing guarantees. It is becoming expensive now: Nvidia and Wall Street are assembling a $500 billion structure of their own, modelled on Google's, to finance data centres full of Nvidia chips. Meanwhile Fluidstack's anchor customer is doing exactly what Fluidstack cannot afford it to do — Anthropic already rents chips from Elon Musk's companies, Amazon and Google Cloud, the investment memorandum puts its need at 4 GW of new compute next year, and in the past week alone it signed $75 billion of agreements with Nscale and Lambda, two rival operators backed by Nvidia. Anthropic did not answer questions about the 4 GW figure. The relationship that made Fluidstack worth $18 billion is the same one that may keep it out of the larger deal now being built next door.