Fluidstack spent months building what it called Europe's most ambitious AI infrastructure project. Last month, it walked away.
The Oxford-based startup has been in talks to raise roughly $1 billion at a valuation of $18 billion, according to Bloomberg via TechCrunch, with Jane Street emerging as the lead investor. Four months ago, Fluidstack was reportedly raising a $700 million round at a $7.5 billion valuation, though it did not formally announce the close of that round. The current target represents a 2.4x step-up in four months. Google had considered putting $100 million into that December round, the Wall Street Journal reported via TechCrunch in February.
The acceleration coincides with a strategic pivot away from Europe. Last month, Fluidstack abandoned a €10 billion AI project in France to focus on opportunities in the United States, Bloomberg reported via TechCrunch. The company, which had been headquartered in Oxford, has since relocated to New York.
Fluidstack was not an obscure bet. In November, Anthropic announced a $50 billion deal with Fluidstack to build data centers in Texas and New York customized for Anthropic's computing needs, according to TechCrunch. That partnership anchors the company's revenue trajectory in a way that pure infrastructure plays typically cannot claim. Beyond Anthropic, Fluidstack counts Meta, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, and Mistral among its customers, TechCrunch reported.
The December round was led by Situational Awareness, the AGI-focused fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, with participation from the Collison brothers, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and investor Daniel Gross.
Jane Street's role as lead is the detail that sharpens the picture. The firm is best known for quantitative trading across global markets, not for writing nine-figure checks into AI infrastructure. Its involvement suggests either a conviction bet on the AI compute buildout that transcends traditional venture categories, or terms structured in a way that makes the position attractive to a firm that lives in probability distributions.
The France exit is the harder fact to contextualize. The €10 billion project represented a serious commitment to European sovereign AI capacity — the kind of thing that governments and incumbents invest in when they want to keep advanced computing on their own soil. Walking away from that to focus on the US suggests Fluidstack's principals made a calculated assessment that American AI labs will consume more compute, faster, than European procurement processes can accommodate. Whether that assessment is correct is the question hanging over the current valuation.
The funding is not closed. Talks are ongoing. But the direction is clear: Fluidstack is doubling down on the US, and the Street is pricing in the upside of that bet.
