Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular ‘AI factories’

Crusoe said it completed a $3.9 billion Series F financing that raises the company's valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, with participation from several large institutional and strategic investors including Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG.

As part of the announcement Crusoe added three new board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials, who previously invested in Crusoe and whose company supplies energy storage to the firm. The infusion will support existing projects such as a large data center site in Abilene, Texas used by OpenAI, and fund production of smaller modular data centers the company calls Spark, which can be transported by truck and connected to substantial power sources.

Crusoe produces Spark units at its own facilities to accelerate deployment of compute without relying on large local construction workforces, and says the smaller footprint could mitigate community resistance that often accompanies very large data center campuses. The company’s revenue streams include leasing space for customers who bring their own GPUs, renting out Crusoe-owned GPUs, and selling compute used for running AI models (inference).

Founded in 2018 as a crypto-mining operation using flared natural gas, Crusoe pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing spiked. The company’s customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. Bloomberg has reported Crusoe recently signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract to supply Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, and Axios reported the company met with bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO. The Series F follows a $1.38 billion raise in October that valued Crusoe at $10 billion.