The genius teenager fired by OpenAI: Join hands with Google to encircle and suppress NVIDIA

To break NVIDIA's monopoly on computing power, Google is supporting cloud service provider Fluidstack to distribute its self-developed TPU chips. Currently, the company is in talks for a huge round of financing worth $700 million. What's most interesting is that the potential lead investor in this round of financing is the genius researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, who was "ousted" by OpenAI. In this high-stakes computing power gamble, Google's ambition, the revenge of a former core member of OpenAI, and the frenzy of capital are intertwined.

In the intensifying computing power arms race in Silicon Valley, a cloud service provider called Fluidstack is quietly stepping into the spotlight.

According to people familiar with the matter, as a key ally for Google to promote its self-developed AI chips, Fluidstack is in talks for a new round of financing exceeding $700 million.

The potential lead investor in this deal is quite controversial - the new fund "Situational Awareness", founded just one year ago by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.

It is reported that Aschenbrenner's fund has previously invested in AI cloud service provider CoreWeave and AI development giant Anthropic, and the latter happens to be a client of Fluidstack.

The Frontline of the Hidden Battle between Google and NVIDIA

Fluidstack is at the eye of the storm in the chip war between Google and NVIDIA.

In the past, the company mainly built its business by renting out NVIDIA's GPUs. However, recently, there has been a subtle but crucial shift in its strategic focus: it has become an important channel for Google to distribute its own TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) to more customers. Prior to this, TPUs could almost only be obtained through Google Cloud.

Extended Reading: Google's TPU that Trained Gemini 3 Has Become a Major Concern for Huang! Meta Has Defected

This still-in-negotiation financing aims to help Fluidstack stand out in the increasingly crowded dedicated server rental market.

Currently, several top AI developers, including Mistral AI, have appeared on its client list.

Although it is currently unknown what the specific valuation of Fluidstack will be in this round of financing, judging from the $700 million financing scale, the company's goal is clearly to join the ranks of unicorns valued at billions of dollars.

The veteran investment bank Morgan Stanley is assisting Fluidstack with the financing. There are even reports that Google itself has considered making a direct investment.

The cooperation between the two sides is deepening rapidly.

Google has agreed to guarantee the lease agreements for three data centers that Fluidstack is currently developing.

In exchange, Fluidstack has promised to host Google's TPUs in at least one data center in New York.

Meanwhile, Anthropic also announced last month that as part of its expanded cooperation with Google, it plans to use up to one million TPUs and will join hands with Fluidstack to invest $50 billion in domestic data centers in the United States.

Capital Frenzy and Profit Pressure

Founded eight years ago, Fluidstack is headquartered in London. Although it has not conducted large-scale equity financing before, its growth rate in the past year has been astonishing through signing a series of large contracts.

According to The Information, Fluidstack estimated in July this year that its annual sales would exceed $400 million, while this figure was only a little over $65 million last year.

To support the high cost of servers, Fluidstack has mainly adopted an aggressive debt financing strategy.

Earlier this year, it obtained approval from lenders including Macquarie for a credit line exceeding $10 billion, with hardware assets including NVIDIA chips as collateral.

Even so, Fluidstack's scale still lags behind that of industry leader CoreWeave, which is expected to double its revenue to $5 billion this year.

The entire industry is booming. Two other private AI cloud service providers, Crusoe and Lambda, have raised a total of $2.9 billion in the past two months to expand their server rental business.

However, as giants like Oracle also face questions from the outside world about the profitability of their AI chip rental business, the market is scrutinizing the model of hoarding chips through huge debts more and more strictly.

The Manipulator: The Genius Teen "Expelled" by OpenAI

This round of financing has attracted a lot of attention, largely thanks to its potential lead investor - Leopold Aschenbrenner.

This genius teenager, who graduated from Columbia University at the age of 19, has a very dramatic resume.

He once worked for the charity fund Future Fund founded by Sam Bankman - Fried, the former CEO of FTX, and then joined OpenAI to conduct research on AI security technology.

During OpenAI's famous "coup" incident, he was regarded as an ally of Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, who tried to remove CEO Altman.

In 2024, OpenAI fired Aschenbrenner on the grounds of "improper information disclosure".

He later defended himself on a podcast that he did share a document with external researchers to seek feedback, but he had deleted the sensitive information.

He revealed that what OpenAI really minded was that the document exposed the company's ambition to achieve AGI in 2027 or 2028 without a corresponding preparation schedule.

He also mentioned that he once sent a memo to the board of directors regarding security issues and received a formal personnel warning in return.

After leaving OpenAI, Aschenbrenner published a long manifesto about AGI called "Situational Awareness" and founded an investment fund of the same name.

This fund has not only received the endorsement of big names such as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and the Collison brothers, the founders of Stripe, but also currently manages assets of over $1.5 billion and has made large bets on various semiconductor and infrastructure companies.

On this long journey towards AGI, computing power may be the ticket to enter, but only those players who can handle huge amounts of capital and wild visions are worthy of seeing the last card on the table.

Reference Materials:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-cloud-provider-aiding-googles-chip-push-talks-raise-700-million 

This article is from the WeChat official account "New Intelligence Yuan". The author is New Intelligence Yuan. It is published by 36Kr with permission.