Fluidstack Seeks $700M at $7B Valuation as AI Data Center Boom Accelerates

AI cloud-computing startup Fluidstack is reportedly in talks to raise roughly $700 million in a new funding round that would value the company at about $7 billion.

According to news reports by The Information and Bloomberg on Friday, Situational Awareness — the investment firm founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner — is in talks to lead the financing. As previously reported, the AI hedge fund has increased its stake in bitcoin miner Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) to 9.4% as of October.

The prospective valuation highlights investors’ growing appetite for companies building data center infrastructure for artificial intelligence systems. Fluidstack, which previously operated out of the UK and recently announced plans to relocate its headquarters to New York, is part of a cohort of “neocloud” providers that lease compute capacity for AI development.

The AI cloud startup has signed multi-year colocation leases worth billions of dollars with Cipher and Terawulf – two of the many public bitcoin mining companies seeking to diversify data center revenues beyond Bitcoin mining. In both arrangements, Google agreed to act as a “backstop” for creditors, committing to repay lenders if Fluidstack defaults or enters bankruptcy.

Such structures underscore the complicated financing models emerging around AI data-center construction. Bloomberg noted that Meta Platforms has secured about $60 billion for data-center expansion, roughly half of which does not appear on its balance sheet as traditional debt.