What was reported
The Pentagon is in talks to lend about $5 billion to Fluidstack, the AI cloud-computing company building data centres for Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reported on 10 September. The money would come from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), a Defense Department unit that lends to companies working in areas it considers critical to national security.
There is no deal yet. According to the Journal’s reporting, as relayed by Yahoo Finance and Tech Startups, the agreement has not been finalised and its terms, including the interest rate Fluidstack would pay, could still change. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report. Neither the Defense Department nor Fluidstack responded to Reuters’ request for comment.
Components, not a campus
The reported purpose is what sets the loan apart. Fluidstack would use the money to shore up the US supply chain and manufacturing capacity for certain data centre components, Reuters reported, rather than to fund a new AI facility outright. The reports did not say which components.
Reuters noted that the talks follow an executive order issued last month in which President Donald Trump declared a national emergency and restricted certain foreign equipment in US electrical grids that serve data centres.
If it goes ahead, the loan would be by far the largest the OSC has made, according to the Journal.
A lender that grew fast
The OSC’s first lending programme offered equipment loans capped at $150 million each. At a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel on 30 June, OSC director David Lorch said the office’s available lending authority had grown from $984 million to more than $210 billion, Defense Daily reported. “We’re focused on making loans, principally between $1 billion and $5 billion per loan,” Lorch said. A $5 billion loan to Fluidstack would sit at the very top of that range.
Until now the office’s deals have looked quite different. Reuters listed earlier OSC financing for the rare-earth companies Vulcan Elements, Phoenix Tailings and Energy Fuels, and for drone makers including Unusual Machines and the Sequoia Capital-backed Neros.
Who Fluidstack is
Fluidstack began as a University of Oxford spinout and has moved its headquarters from the UK to New York, TechCrunch reported. Its profile rose sharply in November 2025, when Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment in US computing infrastructure, starting with custom data centres in Texas and New York built with Fluidstack. Anthropic said those sites would come online throughout 2026.
Fluidstack has said it raised an $830 million Series A round at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by the investment firm Situational Awareness.
A Pentagon loan aimed at component manufacturing would take the company a step beyond building and operating data centres. Neither side has described what that manufacturing would involve.
What to watch
The open questions are the ones the reports could not answer: whether the OSC and Fluidstack sign an agreement, what the final size and interest rate are, and which data centre components the money would be used to produce. Until either party confirms the talks, the $5 billion figure rests on the Journal’s unnamed sources.
