Series D

Cloud for Sale: Oxide Raises $445 Million

co-produced by AI09. October 2026, 18:42

Oxide co-founders Steve Tuck and Bryan Cantrill in the company's lab — Oxide co-founders Steve Tuck (left) and Bryan Cantrill © Oxide Computer Company

Renting is out, at least if Oxide has its way: The California start-up sells companies the cloud as a ready-made server rack for their own data centers, and it can barely keep up with demand. Oxide has just announced a $445 million (about €396 million) Series D round led by the venture firm Eclipse. According to Forbes, the round values the company at $6 billion (about €5.3 billion).

More Orders Than Servers

Alongside Eclipse, existing backers US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Riot Ventures and Jane Street took large allocations, joined by Friends and Family Capital and Counterpart. New to the cap table are the hedge fund Atreides Management and the chipmaker AMD through its venture arm. Only in February, Oxide raised $200 million in a Series C led by USIT. In total, the start-up has now raised about $820 million (roughly €730 million).

Why raise again so quickly? The founders, Steve Tuck, the chief executive, and Bryan Cantrill, the chief technology officer, point to a “very large” order backlog. Oxide has to pay for components and manufacturing before customers pay for their systems. Without new capital, the start-up would have had to be careful about taking on more orders. “Fortunately, this is the problem that capital is born to solve,” the founders wrote. The money will go into components, more manufacturing capacity and long-term investment. Oxide says it has increased its production capacity twentyfold over the past 12 months.

Profitable After Seven Years

That is unusual for a hardware start-up: Oxide is already making money. In the spring, its ordinary operations generated taxable income for the first time, which meant Oxide paid income tax for the first time. According to a person familiar with the company, revenue is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, up from single-digit millions 12 months earlier. Oxide itself has not disclosed revenue, profit or the size of its backlog.

Oxide was founded in 2019 in Emeryville, near San Francisco. Mr. Tuck and Mr. Cantrill met at the cloud provider Joyent, which Samsung bought in 2016. Before that, Mr. Tuck spent years in sales at Dell, while Mr. Cantrill worked for more than a decade as a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. Investors were skeptical at first; one founder called the venture a “suicide mission,” according to Forbes.

Hyperscaler Technology in Your Own Basement

The product is called the Oxide Cloud Computer: a complete rack in which compute, storage, networking and software were designed as one system. The software is open source and the processors come from AMD; there are no GPUs for A.I. training so far. Companies get the architecture of AWS and its rivals but run it in their own data centers, keeping control over data, security and costs. Mr. Tuck says a workload costs about 6 cents an hour on Oxide racks, compared with 26 cents on AWS servers (about 5 and 23 euro cents). “The economics of the public cloud are not sustainable in the long-term and at scale,” Mr. Cantrill said.

Customers include the U.S. national laboratories Lawrence Livermore and Idaho National Laboratory, the rocket start-up Stoke Space, the trading firm Jump Trading and the data center operators CoreSite and Switch. According to Mr. Tuck, an A.I. frontier lab is also among them. Demand is especially strong in heavily regulated industries such as defense and finance. The argument for controlling your own infrastructure also resonates in Europe, where even Amazon’s new sovereign cloud can’t rule out U.S. data access.

Up Against Hyperscalers and Neoclouds

The competition is enormous. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate the market, while neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Crusoe rent out computing power more cheaply. Even Meta is turning itself into an A.I. neocloud. In the traditional on-premises business, Dell, HPE and Nutanix compete with their own private cloud offerings.

The numbers show how far Oxide still has to go: According to Gartner, the public cloud market brought in about $720 billion last year, while companies spent only about $60 billion on private clouds, according to IDC. Mr. Tuck himself concedes that owning infrastructure is not for everyone, especially smaller companies. And as long as Oxide does not put a figure on its profit or its backlog, it remains unclear how quickly those orders will turn into cash.