$70B Investor Coatue Expands Into AI Data Center Land Grab

Coatue Management is expanding its AI push beyond software and startup investments, moving directly into the physical infrastructure race underpinning the AI boom.

The $70 billion investment firm founded by Philippe Laffont has launched a venture called Next Frontier to acquire land for large-scale AI data center developments, according to a Friday report by The Wall Street Journal.

The effort could eventually involve tens of billions of dollars in spending, the report said, as investors increasingly view access to power and land as one of the most strategic bottlenecks in the AI buildout.

One of Next Frontier’s first major projects is a planned data center campus in Indiana targeting AI customers including Anthropic, the developer behind the Claude AI models. The venture is also tied to a joint venture with AI cloud provider Fluidstack, which recently raised $5.7 billion through a junk bond offering to fund a 430-megawatt data center complex in New Lebanon, Indiana, the report said.

Coatue has already been one of the most aggressive financial backers of the AI ecosystem, holding stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic while also investing in infrastructure-linked companies such as GE Vernova, Vistra and AI cloud provider CoreWeave.

The firm has also been an active investor in bitcoin mining companies pivoting toward AI infrastructure. In 2024, Coatue participated in a $150 million convertible notes financing for Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT), providing capital to support the company’s expansion into high-performance computing and AI-focused data center development.

That overlap has accelerated as many bitcoin miners reposition power-heavy industrial sites for AI and HPC workloads. Hut 8 later signed a 15-year, $7 billion colocation agreement with Fluidstack tied to the development of a 245-megawatt AI data center campus in Louisiana. It closed a $3.25 billion bond offering last week, which was directly backed by the project.

According to the report, Next Frontier is being led by Coatue partner Robert Yin and former Blackstone executive Peter Wallace, who recently joined Coatue to oversee private investments. Laffont is also personally funding the venture alongside Coatue’s management company and outside investors.

Anthropic, one of Coatue’s largest AI bets, said in November it would commit $50 billion toward American AI infrastructure and develop data centers with Fluidstack in Texas and New York as competition intensifies with OpenAI and other AI labs racing to secure scarce compute capacity.