AI datacenter startup Fluidstack in talks for $1B round at $18B months after hitting $7.5B, report says.

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

If the deal goes through, it could more than double Fluidstack in a matter of months.

In December the company reportedly raised about $700 million at a cost of $7.5 billion, sources said. Bloomberg at that time, although it did not officially announce the closure of that cycle. This round is said to be led by Situational Awareness, an AGI-focused fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner and supported by Stripe’s Collison brothers, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and AI entrepreneur Daniel Gross.

Apparently the talks were going on in February, at least with Google, which is considering pushing $100 million round, The Wall Street Journal said.

There is good reason for the hype on Fluidstack. In November, Anthropic announced that it was done signed a $50 billion contract is the start of building data centers designed for its needs in Texas and New York. Unlike hyperscalers like AWS, which support all kinds of computing needs, Fluidstack’s architecture is built for AI.

The deal was a big confidence boost for Fluidstack, a company that was relatively unknown in the US before. Anthropic uses AWS and Google Cloud to serve Claude (although it also has a contract with Microsoft to provide Claude to the software giant’s customers). But like its partner OpenAI, Anthropic is growing very fast that it needs more power, and this partnership gives Anthropic more control over its cloud infrastructure.

The partnership is so important to the startup, that Fluidstack – which was founded out of Oxford and has become Europe’s biggest AI star – moved its headquarters from the UK to New York. Last month, it also released a The most important €10 billion AI Project in FranceBloomberg also said, to look at the opportunities of the US.

In addition to Anthropic, it counts Meta, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, and others as clients. Before joining Anthropic, Fluidstack was probably best known for its offerings construction at Mistral.

Fluidstack did not respond to a request for comment.