Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular ‘AI factories’ — SkimNews
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- Crusoe raised $3.9B in Series F funding at a $30.9B valuation, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG also participating.
- Crusoe will deploy the capital across existing data center projects — including a large Abilene, Texas site used by OpenAI — and its new modular 'Spark' AI factories, which Crusoe manufactures at its own facilities and can ship by truck to connect to large power sources.
- Crusoe added three new board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Primary Digital Infrastructure partner and CIO Bill Stein, and Redwood Materials founder JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla's board and personally invested in Crusoe back in 2021.
- Crusoe's three-pronged revenue model combines leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, renting its own GPUs, and selling inference compute power; customers include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
- Crusoe recently signed a $13B, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, per Bloomberg, and has met with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO, per Axios.
- Crusoe's Series F comes just 10 months after its $1.38B raise at a $10B valuation in October, meaning the company has roughly tripled its valuation in under a year.
- Crusoe was founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas before pivoting to AI infrastructure as compute demand surged.
Why it matters: The $30.9B valuation — roughly 3x Crusoe's $10B mark from 10 months ago — shows investor appetite for its hybrid model: hyperscale campuses plus portable 'Spark' units explicitly pitched as a workaround for the community protests that have stalled mega-sites. A signed $13B Jane Street deal and Goldman/Morgan Stanley IPO talks put Crusoe on a public-market runway while deepening ties to Nvidia and OpenAI.
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