Crusoe lands $3.9 billion at a $30.9 billion valuation for AI infrastructure buildout

Crusoe, a developer of data centers for artificial intelligence, said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round, its sixth major funding round, pushing 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, Radical Ventures, and TPG also took part, according to Crusoe.

The company said the money will help finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, that OpenAI uses. It will also fund smaller, modular data centers, prefabricated units built at Crusoe’s own facilities, that can be moved by truck and hooked up to power sources almost anywhere. Crusoe calls this line of products Spark.

Building the modular units in-house lets Crusoe deploy computing capacity without large construction crews, the company said. The smaller footprint could also help it avoid a problem other data center developers face: pushback from residents near planned mega-sites.

Crusoe named three new board members alongside the raise: Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert, Primary Digital Infrastructure partner and chief investment officer Bill Stein, and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel, who also serves on Tesla’s board. Straubel has a longer history with Crusoe: he invested personally in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business. Crusoe co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller said in a statement that he believes AI will bring about an era of abundance, achieved by “controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens.”

Crusoe makes money three ways: leasing data center space to customers with their own chips, renting out its own graphics processing units, and selling computing power to run AI models, a service known as inference. That mix has made the eight-year-old company one of the more valuable AI infrastructure firms. Bloomberg has reported that Crusoe signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract with quantitative trading firm Jane Street. Axios reported last month that Crusoe had met with investment bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a possible initial public offering.

Crusoe started in 2018 as a crypto mining operation that ran on flared natural gas, gas that would otherwise be burned off as waste, before shifting to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power grew. Its customers now include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. Crusoe has not said when, or whether, it will file for an IPO; Axios reported only that talks with bankers took place. What comes next is whether those talks advance, and how Crusoe delivers on commitments like the Jane Street contract.