Crusoe raises $3.9B and starts building truck-sized AI factories

Data center developer Crusoe said Thursday it had closed a $3.9 billion Series F round, lifting its valuation to $30.9 billion. Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners co-led the round. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures and TPG also took part.

The round arrives 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October.

Where the money goes

The capital will fund existing data center projects, among them a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI. It will also pay for smaller modular AI factories called Spark, units that can be hauled by truck and plugged into a large power source almost anywhere.

Crusoe builds these modular units at its own facilities, so it can bring compute online quickly without assembling a large construction workforce. The smaller sites also soften another problem for developers: pushback from local communities that oppose huge complexes near their neighborhoods.

The company named three new board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla's board. Straubel invested in Crusoe personally in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood's energy storage business.

Three revenue streams

Crusoe earns money by leasing space to customers who bring their own GPUs, by renting out its own GPUs, and by selling compute used to run AI models, known as inference. Bloomberg reported that the company recently signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure. Axios reported last month that Crusoe met with bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about a possible IPO.

Founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas, Crusoe shifted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power climbed. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.

Full details in TechCrunch's report.

Second source: Crusoe.