The co-founder who built one of Europe's most valuable AI infrastructure companies was studying classics. Jamie Cox, then at Oxford, was reading the ancient world while his friend Gary Wu studied economics down the corridor. In 2017 they started a company with an idea that sounded almost too small: gamers' graphics cards sat idle, AI researchers could not find enough compute, so why not connect them?
That was the early product, a marketplace that rented out unused GPUs. It was scrappy, and so were the numbers. Revenue in 2022 was US$1.8 million. Cox, according to a VnExpress profile, left Oxford the year after the company was founded to take up a Thiel Fellowship, the programme that pays young people to skip college. He was a dropout in a field that does not ordinarily lead to server racks.
That was the early product, a marketplace that rented out unused GPUs.
What almost nobody saw was the pivot. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the marketplace changed shape. Instead of stitching together hobbyist GPUs, Fluidstack started renting larger pools from companies and university labs. In 2020 Cesar Maklary joined, a man who had worked in aerodynamics for a Formula One team. His background was in engineering at speed, and the company needed that.
The next four years were steady, not spectacular. Revenue reached US$30 million in 2023 and US$66.2 million in 2024. Then came the AI boom, and the customer list changed. Fluidstack worked with Meta, Mistral, Poolside and Black Forest Labs. In November 2025, Anthropic announced a US$50 billion US computing investment and chose Fluidstack to build custom data centres in New York and Texas. It also appeared to be the first publicly known operator of TPU data centres outside Google, as part of Anthropic's planned deployment of up to one million Google TPUs.
Not everything held. The company withdrew from a planned €10 billion data centre project in France as it shifted its focus to the United States, and its headquarters now sits in New York. Valuation rose from US$7.5 billion earlier in 2026 to above US$18 billion after a US$1.5 billion round led by Jane Street, with projected 2026 revenue of US$660 million. The founders, aged around 29 to 31, are reported to have crossed into billionaire territory.
But the quiet detail is the humblest one: a company that now builds data centres for frontier labs began as two students noticing a mismatch between a teenager's gaming PC and a researcher's waiting list.
The lesson for first-time founders: a small, almost silly observation about idle resources can hold a very large market, if you are willing to change the product three times to find it.