Crusoe announced that it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F funding round, bringing its valuation to $30.9 billion. The company will use the capital to finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as to develop smaller data centers that rely less on traditional construction work.
The round was led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG. The funding came about ten months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a valuation of $10 billion in October last year.
From Large Data Centers to Portable Units
Crusoe is developing modular computing centers called Spark, which are manufactured at its own facilities. These units can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources at different sites, enabling computing capacity to be deployed faster than projects that require the construction of massive campuses and large construction teams.
The company says this model could also help it partially address local communities’ objections to building large data centers near residential neighborhoods. However, the article does not specify how many Spark units Crusoe will produce or the timelines for deploying them, so the model’s impact on the speed and cost of expansion remains to be tested in practice.
A Multipronged Business Model Around AI Infrastructure
Crusoe generates revenue from three main streams: leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPU units, leasing company-owned GPU units, and selling computing capacity to run artificial intelligence models, known as inference services.
This model has helped the company establish its position among AI infrastructure companies. Its customer list includes Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. According to a Bloomberg report, Crusoe also signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPU units and AI infrastructure.
Why Does This Matter?
The round shows that competition in artificial intelligence is not focused solely on model design, but also extends to having the capacity to provide electricity, data centers, GPU units, and operational services. Modular units give Crusoe an alternative to building ultra-large campuses, particularly when deployment speed or community acceptance is an influential factor.
Crusoe also announced the appointment of three new members to its board of directors: Thomas Seifert, the chief financial officer at Cloudflare; Bill Stein, partner and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and chief executive officer of Redwood Materials and a member of Tesla’s board of directors. Straubel personally invested in Crusoe in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.
Crusoe was founded in 2018 as a company that mined cryptocurrency using flared natural gas, before shifting to AI infrastructure as demand for computing increased. Axios reported last month that the company met with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential initial public offering, but this does not constitute an announcement of a date or final decision for the offering.