The US Department of Defense is negotiating a loan of five billion dollars to the AI cloud provider Fluidstack, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. It would be the largest single loan to date from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. The money is intended not to finance new data centers but to strengthen the US supply chain for electrical components.
Pentagon loan office expands framework to over 210 billion
The Office of Strategic Capital was established through the Defense Authorization Act for 2024 and awarded its first program in March of that year. At that time, up to 984 million dollars were available for around ten companies, in tranches between 10 and 150 million dollars. The framework has since grown to over 210 billion dollars, as Director David Lorch stated in June at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The office will now focus on loans between one and five billion dollars per project.
The Fluidstack loan would stretch this new framework and, according to the Wall Street Journal, surpass the office’s previous record. The figure remains unverified: neither the Pentagon nor Fluidstack has confirmed the discussions. Specifically, the money is intended to flow into domestic manufacturing of components such as transformers and switchgear, not into the construction of new data centers. The timing coincides with a decree from President Trump on August 26 that declared a national emergency due to foreign network components. The Department of Energy must publish the associated implementation rules by December 24.
Fluidstack builds data centers for Anthropic, Nvidia, and Meta
Fluidstack was founded in 2017 at the University of Oxford and is now headquartered in New York. The company claims to manage over 100,000 graphics processors and builds custom data centers for major AI providers. Listed customers on its website include Anthropic, Nvidia, and Meta. Other clients mentioned by the company include Mistral, Character.AI, Poolside, and Black Forest Labs.
Reports indicate that Fluidstack initially raised 830 million dollars this year at a valuation of 7.5 billion dollars. A later round led by Jane Street for 1.5 billion dollars is said to have driven the valuation to 18 billion dollars. Fluidstack itself has not confirmed these figures.
Anthropic selected Fluidstack last year to build locations in New York and Texas as part of a 50 billion dollar investment in US data centers. The initiative is part of a series of billion-dollar computing deals through which Anthropic has been securing capacity for its language model Claude for months. Just earlier in September, the company secured additional capacity from provider Lambda for 35 billion dollars.
It will be crucial whether the Department of Defense officially confirms the loan before the deadline for the implementation regulation on December 24. The contrast to the Pentagon’s own relationship with Anthropic is striking: while the department may be co-financing a key infrastructure partner of the company, its in-house AI program GenAI.mil continues to operate without Anthropic’s model Claude.
