Washington is weighing an unusual intervention in the AI buildout: a loan of roughly $5B to Fluidstack, a young cloud company that supplies GPU capacity to model developers. The talks, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Reuters, would rank among the largest government financings the sector has seen.
The money would come from the Office of Strategic Capital, which lends to companies working in areas deemed critical to national security. Both the Pentagon and Fluidstack declined to comment.
Unlike a typical project loan, the financing would target manufacturing capacity and supply chains for data centre components rather than a single new facility, reflecting concern that electrical gear, cooling systems, transformers and networking hardware can all become bottlenecks.
The scale stands out. Fluidstack raised $830M in Series A funding at a $7.5B valuation earlier this year and separately collected $1.5B from Jane Street this month. A $5B loan would dwarf both.
Founded at Oxford University in 2017 and now based in New York, Fluidstack builds GPU clusters and custom data centres and says it manages more than 100,000 GPUs. Anthropic hired it to build facilities in New York and Texas as part of a $50B US investment plan, and its customer list includes Mistral, Character.AI and Poolside.
Washington has tightened rules on foreign equipment in the power grid, tying electricity infrastructure to the AI race. The Office of Strategic Capital has been expanding its loan book as the government takes a more direct role in funding the boom.
