Data center developer Crusoe raises $3.9B for new AI infrastructure
US company Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round, pushing its valuation to $30.9 billion. The funds will go toward large data centers and transportable modular AI units.
Data center developer Crusoe announced Thursday it has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F funding round, raising its valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with additional participation from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG.
The company also announced 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 serves on Tesla's board. Straubel has prior ties to Crusoe, having personally invested in the company in 2021, after which Crusoe became the first customer of Redwood's energy storage business.
Funding plans
The eight-year-old company will use the new capital to finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas used by OpenAI, as well as smaller, modular AI units called Spark that can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere. By manufacturing these modular data centers at its own facilities, Crusoe can deploy computing capacity quickly without needing large construction crews. The smaller centers may also help the company avoid some backlash from local communities opposing massive data center complexes near their neighborhoods.
In a statement, Crusoe's CEO said he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, which requires controlling infrastructure from electrons to tokens.
Crusoe generates revenue by leasing data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling compute power for running AI models. The company recently signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract with quantitative trading firm Jane Street. Last month, it was reported that Crusoe met with investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO.
The new funding round comes 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October. The company was founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas before pivoting to AI infrastructure. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
