Crusoe Secures $3.9 Billion to Expand Data Centers and Modular AI Factories

Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F funding round, lifting its valuation to $30.9 billion, the data center developer announced Thursday.

The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG also took part, according to the company.

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

The eight-year-old company will use the capital to fund existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, plus smaller modular AI factories that can be hauled by truck and hooked up to major power sources almost anywhere.

Made at Crusoe's own facilities under the name Spark, these modular data centers let the company add compute capacity quickly without large construction crews. They could also help Crusoe partly avoid community pushback against massive complexes built near neighborhoods.

Crusoe's co-founder and CEO said in a statement that AI will bring an era of abundance, but reaching it means controlling infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and he expressed gratitude to investors who share that conviction.

The company earns money by leasing data center space to customers who supply their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling inference compute power.

Bloomberg reported that Crusoe recently signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure. Axios reported last month that the company met with investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, about a possible IPO.

The raise comes 10 months after Crusoe's $1.38 billion round at a $10 billion valuation last October. Founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas, the company pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power surged. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Source: TechCrunch