Fluidstack Valuation Doubles to $18B After $1.5B Round Led by Jane Street
The AMW Read
Explicit $1.5B round at $18B+ valuation (doubling in six weeks) plus hyperscale data-center/TPU build-out for Anthropic meaningfully updates a known neocloud player without introducing a new top-tier entrant.
Fluidstack Valuation Doubles to $18B After $1.5B Round Led by Jane Street
Fluidstack, the AI infrastructure company founded in 2017 by Jamie Cox, Gary Wu, and Cesar Maklary, closed a previously unreported $1.5 billion funding round led by quantitative trading firm Jane Street, Forbes reported. The round more than doubled the company's valuation to over $18 billion, up from $7.5 billion earlier in 2026, pushing the three founders' stakes into billionaire territory. Fluidstack has since relocated its headquarters from Britain to New York. Per the AI Market Watch index, which tracks roughly 5,000 companies (coverage, not a census), Fluidstack's total funding stood at $1,095.2 million before this round — a figure the new financing pushes well past.
The deal extends a pattern already visible in Fluidstack's own history: an $830 million Series A led by Situational just six weeks earlier valued the company near $7.5 billion, meaning valuation more than doubled in under two months. That pace tracks Fluidstack's revenue curve — from $1.8 million in 2022 to $30 million in 2023 to $66.2 million in 2024 — built on hyperscale contracts including Anthropic's $50 billion U.S. infrastructure commitment, which tapped Fluidstack to build custom data centers in New York and Texas and to support deployment of up to one million Google Tensor Processing Units. Other customers include Meta, Mistral, Poolside, and Black Forest Labs. A quant trading firm anchoring a mega-round, rather than a traditional AI-focused VC, signals the capital base for neocloud infrastructure is broadening beyond venture funds.
For builders and investors, Fluidstack's trajectory shows that data-center capacity tied to a single anchor customer (Anthropic) can compress years of valuation growth into months, but it also concentrates counterparty risk: the France data-center project with Macron was dropped once larger U.S. contracts materialized, underscoring how fast neocloud providers can reprioritize geography around whichever hyperscale customer is paying.
