Google LLC is reportedly in discussions for a $100 million investment in cloud startup Fluidstack Ltd. Sources suggest the deal could value Fluidstack at $7.5 billion. The low-profile startup has previously secured about $25 million in equity funding and a $10 billion line of credit for data center construction.
Fluidstack operates a cloud platform designed for artificial intelligence training and inference workloads. Its key offering is the rapid deployment of large graphics card clusters. An early customer, Poolside Inc., provisioned a cluster with over 2,500 GPUs in just 48 hours.
The company's catalog features advanced chips like Nvidia Corp.'s GB200, which pairs two Blackwell B200 graphics cards with a central processing unit. Customers can manage Fluidstack-hosted infrastructure using Kubernetes or Slurm, tools that automate hardware resource allocation for AI models.
Fluidstack's platform simplifies the use of these open-source tools through a centralized dashboard for provisioning servers and performing maintenance. An observability tool, Lighthouse, alerts administrators to potential hardware issues, including malfunctions in the PCIe link connecting GPUs to host servers.
This potential Google investment is seen as an effort to promote its tensor processing unit (TPU) artificial intelligence chips. Google's newest TPU, Ironwood, offers significantly enhanced performance and efficiency. The tech giant is reportedly increasing financial support to data-center partners to boost TPU adoption, with Fluidstack potentially among them. Google is also backing infrastructure construction contracts signed by Fluidstack with data center builders Hut 8 Corp. and TeraWulf Inc.
In a separate initiative, Fluidstack is collaborating with Anthropic PBC on a $50 billion project to build AI data centers in the U.S., with initial facilities expected to launch this year.