The Pentagon is in talks to lend roughly $5 billion to AI cloud-computing startup Fluidstack, Reuters reported Thursday, September 10, citing a Wall Street Journal report based on people familiar with the matter. Reuters noted it could not independently verify the reporting, and the Defense Department and Fluidstack did not respond to its request for comment. The deal is not finalized.
What the money is actually for
The loan would not fund a new AI data center. According to the reporting, Fluidstack would use it to shore up United States manufacturing capacity and supply chains for data-center components. The reporting describes the target as certain data-center-related components rather than an AI facility itself.
The financing would come through the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, a lending arm created to direct private capital toward technologies the Defense Department considers strategically critical. At about $5 billion, this would be by far its largest deal to date. Its prior loans have gone to rare-earth companies Vulcan Elements, Phoenix Tailings and Energy Fuels, and to drone makers Unusual Machines and Neros — the same instrument Washington has used for critical-minerals and drone supply chains.
Who Fluidstack is
Fluidstack was founded in 2017 at Oxford University and is headquartered in New York. It builds and operates AI infrastructure — GPU clusters and custom-built data centers — and manages more than 100,000 GPUs. Earlier in 2026 it raised an $830 million Series A at a $7.5 billion valuation. In April, TechCrunch reported it was in talks for about $1 billion more at an $18 billion valuation, with Jane Street and Situational Awareness in talks to co-lead.
Its customer and partner list includes Anthropic, Mistral, Character.AI, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, Nvidia and Meta. Comparable AI-infrastructure raises this year include Positron AI's $875 million at a $5 billion valuation for inference chips. Fluidstack is building custom data centers in New York and Texas as part of Anthropic's $50 billion infrastructure investment — the same buildout that sits alongside Anthropic's $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta for a Norway data center and its expectation that its IPO will match or exceed SpaceX's $75 billion record raise.
For a look at what agent-driven operations already do in the wild, GreyNoise recorded AI agents compromising 440 PaperCut servers across 48 countries.
Source: Reuters
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