Fluidstack targets $18B valuation as Jane Street leads $1B raise
What's the deal? Fluidstack, a data centre startup founded in London in 2017, is in talks to raise $1B at an $18B valuation, co-led by Jane StreetDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Situational Awareness — the AGI-focused fund of former OpenAI researcher Leopold AschenbrennerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → — with Morgan StanleyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → advising.
The raise follows a $750M round earlier in 2026Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, also led by Situational Awareness, which valued the company at $7.5B.
Why now? Fluidstack sits at the centre of AI's infrastructure bottleneck. In November 2025, AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → signed a $50B deal with the company to build custom data centres in Texas and New York — a landmark vote of confidence. Its customers also include Meta, Mistral, Poolside, and Black Forest Labs.
The company relocated its headquarters from London to New York in December 2025 and pulled out of a €10B data centre project in France in March 2026 to focus entirely on US expansion — a sharp strategic pivot toward where AI infrastructure spending is concentrated.
What could go wrong? The round is not yet finalised and details could change — at an $18B valuation, the bar for closing is high and the jump from $7.5B is steep. Underneath all this, the business still rests on a complex web of dependencies — anchor customers, credit backstops, and crypto miners — any one of which could wobble.
The neocloud sector is also intensely competitive, with CoreWeave and others fighting for the same enterprise AI compute contracts. And pulling out of the French project may strain European relationships at a time when regulatory goodwill matters.
The signal: Fluidstack's $18B target valuation — if achieved — would more than double its worth from earlier in 2026, a pace that reflects just how urgently capital is chasing AI infrastructure. That Jane Street and Situational Awareness are both circling suggests the investor base for this asset class is broadening well beyond traditional venture.
Sources:
TechCrunch
The Next Web
Tech in Asia
Mezha
Bloomberg
The Telegraph
Bloomberg
Bloomberg
Image generated by AI
J.V.
