This small company has a valuation of 18 billion US dollars: Google's "secret weapon" to challenge NVIDIA

Image Source: ILLUSTRATION BY FERNANDO CAPETO FOR FORBES; IMAGES FROM LEFT: ERMAN GUNES / GETTYIMAGES; ROBERT WAY/GETTY IMAGES

Little-known Fluidstack has emerged as a testbed for Google's in-house AI chip sales initiative, a role that has earned it an $18 billion valuation and catapulted its founders into the ranks of billionaires.

This small British startup was founded in 2017, with its initial business helping gamers rent out idle GPUs to AI researchers to earn extra cash. The company never disclosed any financing information before July this year, and its founders rarely gave interviews. Despite its low profile, Fluidstack has become a testing ground for Google's ambitious plan to expand its AI chip business, with the goal of building a business that can rival Nvidia.

Google's self-developed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) have been in use for more than a decade, supporting all lines of business ranging from autonomous vehicles to the machine learning systems behind YouTube and search operations. For years, Google has provided TPU services to external parties through its Google Cloud business, allowing enterprise customers to lease TPU computing power. Amid the ongoing surge in chip demand, the fastest-growing business unit of this $4 trillion market cap company is operating at full speed, with a backlog of demand orders reaching $514 billion.

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Nowadays, Google has also begun to sell TPU chips directly to other enterprises. These chips have gradually become a competitive alternative to Nvidia's AI chips, with growing competitiveness.

In October 2025, Anthropic signed an agreement with Google to purchase up to 1 million TPUs for building and running the next-generation Claude large model. This is the first large-scale TPU sales order announced by Google.

Google's layout goes far beyond selling chips themselves. The search giant holds a large stake in Anthropic, and has carefully designed a $200 billion financing plan to fund Anthropic's TPU deployment. As first reported by the Financial Times, Google, together with Wall Street giants including Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, Morgan Stanley, and chip manufacturer Broadcom, jointly assisted Anthropic in completing chip procurement and deployment.

Fluidstack is at the core of this layout: With Google's endorsement, the company has launched multi-billion dollar transactions to integrate excess power resources from multiple cryptocurrency miners. Last November, Anthropic announced that it would invest $500 billion in data center construction, which would be undertaken by Fluidstack — an amount roughly corresponding to the construction cost of 1 gigawatt of computing power. Fluidstack builds data centers for Anthropic's million-scale TPU deployment project, making it the first publicly known TPU data center operator outside Google.

Google confirmed that Anthropic is currently the only publicly disclosed customer that deploys TPUs in its own data centers. Anthropic stated that the company adopts a diversified computing power strategy, using hardware from Google, Nvidia, AMD and Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the same time, and is also developing self-developed custom chips. Fluidstack declined to comment on related matters.

Morgan Stanley expects that Google will generate $13 billion in revenue next year from chip sales alone.

According to an investment memorandum shared by one of Fluidstack's venture capital investors, the company will operate up to 1.3 gigawatts of computing power at more than 10 sites this year. The memorandum forecasts that Fluidstack's revenue will rise to $660 million in 2026, more than tripling from $200 million last year. The company's goal is to exceed 17 gigawatts of total computing power across its operating sites by 2030. According to a report from investment bank Jefferies, this scale will surpass the total data center capacity of Amazon and Microsoft in the United States at present.

At the pace of 1.3 gigawatts this year, Fluidstack will soon outperform the listed new cloud service provider Nebius (market cap $57.4 billion), which previously planned to put 1 gigawatt of AI data centers into operation in 2026. Its competitor CoreWeave (market cap $47 billion) said it will expand its computing power scale to 1.5 gigawatts by the end of this year. The business models of Nebius and CoreWeave are different: they purchase chips (almost all Nvidia GPUs) and then lease out computing power. Fluidstack's idea is that compared with directly purchasing chips, the model of building self-owned data centers and leasing chip hosting space can greatly accelerate expansion.

According to multiple sources close to the company, to support its data center construction plan, Fluidstack has completed a previously undisclosed $1.5 billion financing led by quantitative fund Jane Street, with a post-money valuation of over $18 billion (Bloomberg previously reported that the company was in talks for a $1 billion financing). Back in July this year, Fluidstack just announced the completion of a $750 million financing with a post-money valuation of $7.5 billion, led by the Situational Awareness fund under hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner. Filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that Fluidstack, together with a group of new partners including the data center division under tech fund Coatue, has raised more than $15 billion through debt financing for project construction.

Before last December, the startup was still headquartered in London, and has now moved to New York. If it had stayed in the UK, it would have been tied with drone developer Helsing as the highest-valued AI startup in Europe — the latter was valued at $18 billion when it raised financing in July this year. According to company filings that detail the shareholdings of the three founders, this financing would have allowed Fluidstack's three co-founders — 31-year-old Gary Wu, 29-year-old Jamie Cox and 29-year-old César Maklary — to rank among the youngest self-made billionaires in Europe.

Fluidstack declined to comment. Jane Street and Aschenbrenner did not respond to requests for comment.

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Cox met Wu, who was studying economics, when he was pursuing a degree in classical studies at the University of Oxford. The two founded Fluidstack in 2017. The following year, Cox dropped out of university and became a Thiel Fellow. "We found that on one side, our friends pursuing doctoral degrees were struggling to access computing power from hyperscale cloud providers... On the other side, our hardcore cloud gaming friends had top-tier devices that were only used two or three nights a week, so we thought there was a market here," Maklary said in a 2024 YouTube sharing. Before joining the startup in 2020, he worked on aerodynamics for a Formula 1 (F1) team.

The company grew slowly in its early days. In 2020, Cox and Wu also launched a cashback card by the way, with proceeds going to fund tree-planting projects. At the beginning, this product called Treecard was more popular with investors than Fluidstack, and had raised more than $30 million in financing by 2022 (the project was shut down in April 2026).

During the pandemic, Fluidstack shifted its business to bulk leasing of GPU computing power from enterprises and university laboratories. Later, the company successively secured cooperation orders from startups including Poolside, Mistral and Character.ai. After the launch of ChatGPT, the company further expanded its business, and began to operate AI supercomputing clusters composed of thousands of GPUs in other enterprises' data centers. According to the latest financial data disclosed by Fluidstack in its UK company filings, the company's revenue soared to over $66 million in 2024.

By February 2025, at the AI Action Summit promoted by French President Emmanuel Macron, this little-known startup unexpectedly became the focus. Macron announced at the meeting that Fluidstack would participate in the construction of a $11.5 billion data center in France. "Nvidia has promised me that they will deliver chips when we need them," Maklary told The Wall Street Journal at the time. Later that year, Maklary and Wu also appeared alongside Jensen Huang at Nvidia's annual chip show in California, and the Nvidia CEO signed his name on a Lego model of one of the company's AI chips.

Just over a year later, Fluidstack was reported to have pulled out of the partnership. A source close to the company revealed that the French project was halted because more power resources could be secured in the United States in a shorter time. At that time, Claude became a huge hit with its excellent code generation capabilities, and Anthropic and Google were eager to build new data centers, so Fluidstack had already started negotiations with both parties.

Starting from last August, filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by three struggling Bitcoin miners gradually revealed traces of the tripartite cooperation.

Fluidstack began to sign multi-billion dollar long-term agreements to lock in power resources for the next ten years from Bitcoin miners such as TeraWulf, Cipher Mining and Hut 8. According to Forbes, as of December 2024, Fluidstack had only completed $30 million in equity financing and $38 million in debt financing on its books. Google was revealed to have provided billions of dollars in funding guarantees for these contracts. The total power resources locked in by these agreements are close to 1 gigawatt.

Then in November, Anthropic announced its cooperation with Fluidstack. "We chose Fluidstack as our partner because of its exceptional agility to rapidly deliver gigawatt-scale power resources," Anthropic wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Fluidstack has other clients: Meta, Jane Street and Black Forest Labs. The company has already disclosed to new employees that it plans to lock in 50 gigawatts of power resources by 2030. "Our goal is to sign more computing power capacity than any other company in the market within this decade," a job posting reads. Candidates will "operate not just a single data center, but infrastructure on a scale comparable to that of G7 countries."

Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder of DDN, an AI data storage company that supplies Fluidstack, said the Fluidstack co-founders were able to secure meetings and partnerships with Silicon Valley giants because they proved their ability to rapidly expand data centers and deliver on tight deadlines.

The company also provides "white-glove" exclusive services for startups, taking charge of building and maintaining AI chip clusters that are sometimes unstable. This service is very practical for researchers using familiar Nvidia chips equipped with the powerful CUDA software library; and it is critical for TPU application scenarios. Very few people outside Google's AI labs have direct access to such chips, and the supporting software framework for TPUs is relatively imperfect.

The aforementioned investor memorandum clearly points out that Fluidstack's core selling point now is speed. The company claims that it can complete the construction of a data center in three months, which would take Google, Amazon or Meta at least a year. A source close to the company revealed that Fluidstack has simplified its data center design, prioritizing construction speed, similar to Elon Musk's approach to building the Colossus data center in Tennessee. LinkedIn position updates show that over the past year, Fluidstack has recruited more than a dozen former employees from Tesla and SpaceX.

In June this year, Fluidstack quietly signed leases for two buildings on the outskirts of Glendale, Arizona, with a total area of over 1 million square feet. The company is recruiting dozens of people with experience in factory management and robotic welding. According to job postings, the startup is building modular data center units that can be transported by trailer to remote locations, such as one of its new data center sites about 80 miles west of Abilene, Texas.

The company is also recruiting experts with experience in the construction and operation of "utility-scale" photovoltaic power stations. This helps avoid disputes that state power grids cannot support the load of existing data centers under construction — an issue that has previously sparked widespread opposition.

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As Fluidstack's valuation skyrockets, Wu, Cox and Maklary are not the only ones reaping huge profits.

The company has also introduced a number of previously undisclosed well-known investors. BlackRock, Atreides Management under hedge fund manager Gavin Baker, and Charlie Songhurst, a member of Meta's board of directors, are all listed as shareholders in the company's filings. Multiple sources also revealed that Spark Capital, an early investor in Alphabet and Anthropic, is also one of its investors.

As the lead investor of the $7.5 billion financing round earlier this year, the fund under Leopold Aschenbrenner is currently one of Fluidstack's largest shareholders, with a stake worth about $2 billion (it is reported that he also holds $5 billion worth of shares in Fluidstack's core partner Anthropic, and his wife is the chief of staff to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic). It is reported that Aschenbrenner is facing an SEC investigation over $35 billion in losses from leveraged investments in AI-related stocks, losses that led to his hedge fund's portfolio being sold to Citadel in July this year. Despite this major setback, he is reportedly continuing to write new investment checks for startups.

Other people in Aschenbrenner's circle also hold Fluidstack shares, such as Dylan Patel, a chip analyst at semiconductor analysis firm SemiAnalysis, who is said to share an office with the investor in San Francisco. Forbes estimates that a special purpose vehicle (SPV) named after the analyst and Doug O'Laughlin, president of SemiAnalysis, currently holds approximately $140 million worth of Fluidstack shares.

The newsletters and research reports on chips, AI and new cloud sectors published by SemiAnalysis have become must-read materials for tech investors. But Patel's relationship with Fluidstack is now at the center of a legal dispute between him and Wei Zhou, a former employee who was fired in January this year. SemiAnalysis first sued Zhou, accusing him of breaching contract and leaking trade secrets; just a few days later, Zhou filed a counterclaim, alleging that Patel pressured him to incorporate sensitive TPU data from Fluidstack into SemiAnalysis reports, and that this non-public data could affect the stock prices of companies including Nvidia and Google, in suspected violation of securities laws. Both cases have now entered arbitration proceedings.

SemiAnalysis and Wei Zhou did not respond to requests for comment. Dylan Patel declined to comment publicly.

Conspicuously absent from Fluidstack's list of investors is Nvidia, one of the most active investors in AI startups. The $5 trillion market cap chip giant has invested tens of billions of dollars to support a new generation of cloud service providers including CoreWeave, Nebius and Crusoe, all of which provide computing power services for Nvidia chips. Fluidstack may be the only new cloud data center builder that has not received Nvidia investment.

Even Fluidstack's largest customer shows little loyalty. The company may hope to capture a portion of Anthropic's chip spending — the aforementioned investment memorandum forecasts that this cutting-edge AI lab will need 4 gigawatts of new computing power next year (Anthropic did not respond to inquiries about related data). But Anthropic is also leasing chips from Elon Musk, Amazon and Google Cloud. At the end of August, the company also signed a total of $750 billion cooperation agreements with Nscale and Lambda, Fluidstack's competitors that have both received Nvidia investment.

Right now, Nvidia is following Google's model, partnering with Wall Street to launch a $500 billion financing plan to fund new data centers equipped with its own chips. Tied deeply to the Google camp, Fluidstack may miss out on this larger market opportunity.

This article is translated from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/09/03/a-tiny-startup-helping-google-take-on-nvidia-is-now-worth-18-billion/

Original Title: This Small Startup Helps Google Compete With Nvidia, And Is Now Valued At $18 Billion

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Forbes" (ID: forbes_china), Author: Iain Martin; Translator: Lemin, republished with authorization from 36Kr.