The Pentagon is considering a $5 billion loan to AI cloud outfit Fluidstack as Washington turns national security into data-centre finance.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the proposed funding would come through the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. If approved, it would be the office’s largest loan by a considerable margin.
Rather than simply bunging billions into another shiny AI data centre, the money would strengthen US manufacturing and supply chains for equipment needed to build them. That includes the less glamorous kit required to feed power into enormous GPU clusters and stop them cooking themselves, as AI infrastructure consumes increasingly heroic quantities of electricity.
The Office of Strategic Capital provides loans to companies working in areas Washington considers important to US national security. The Biden administration established it, and it has expanded significantly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. It now has authority for more than $200 billion in financing and has previously backed companies working on rare-earth materials, batteries and drones.
A $5 billion Fluidstack deal would represent a major shift in scale and put the US military closer to financing the infrastructure behind the AI boom.
Erebor Bank is advising Fluidstack on the proposed loan. Oculus founder and defence technology entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, an early Trump supporter, started the bank.
Founded in London in 2017, Fluidstack shifted its global headquarters to New York in December 2025 as it expanded its US data-centre operation. Fluidstack raised an $830 million Series A at a $7.5 billion valuation earlier this year. A subsequent $1.5 billion financing led by Jane Street reportedly valued the company at more than $18 billion.
The company has become a major infrastructure partner for Anthropic, which announced a $50 billion US computing build-out using Fluidstack data centres in New York and Texas. Those facilities are being designed specifically for Anthropic’s workloads, with the companies expecting them to support continued development and deployment of increasingly large AI models.
Fluidstack’s business differs from GPU-cloud operators, which buy enormous quantities of Nvidia accelerators and rent access to customers. It concentrates on acquiring power, designing and building data centres and operating the resulting infrastructure. The Pentagon discussions come as Washington becomes increasingly twitchy about foreign equipment embedded in the electricity infrastructure supplying US data centres.
The $5 billion loan remains under discussion and has not been approved. Its eventual amount, terms and structure could still change.
