The Pentagon is in talks to lend roughly $5 billion to AI cloud-computing start-up Fluidstack, in a move intended to strengthen the United States’ data-centre supply chain, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The discussions, reported on Thursday September 10, are understood to be taking place through the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which provides loans and loan guarantees to companies involved in technologies considered important to US national security.
The proposed financing has not been finalised and the report was not immediately independently verified. The Pentagon and Fluidstack did not immediately comment.
The Office of Strategic Capital was established in 2022 and was later given authority by Congress to provide loans and guarantees across 31 critical technology categories. Its first direct loan, worth $150 million, was announced in August 2025 for rare-earths producer MP Materials.
New York-headquartered Fluidstack develops and operates high-performance computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence companies. It has also been selected by Anthropic to deliver custom data centres in New York and Texas as part of a planned $50 billion US infrastructure project.
A Pentagon loan of the size under discussion would underline the growing role of government-backed finance in the race to expand America’s AI computing capacity, as companies compete to secure data centres, electricity and advanced processors.
