Crusoe Raises $3.9 Billion at a $30.9 Billion Valuation to Build AI Factories

Crusoe said Thursday it has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that values the AI infrastructure company at $30.9 billion post-money, tripling its valuation in ten months as the fight for AI computing capacity intensifies. The Denver company, which started in 2018 as a cryptocurrency operation and pivoted to AI infrastructure, said the oversubscribed round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

The round

The announcement covers the initial closing of what Crusoe described as an anticipated $3.9 billion Series F, according to the company's press release. Alongside the three co-leads, the round drew backing from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG, among others.

Crusoe said it will use the proceeds to expand its existing programs and support the build-out of its own AI factories — the company's term for the data centers it develops, owns and operates across the AI stack. With more than $140 billion in total contracted value across its platform, Crusoe has become one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies in the world.

The buildout

Crusoe made its name building one of the largest AI supercomputers on earth: a data-center complex in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI and constructed over the past two years. The next bet is going small. Crusoe is manufacturing modular data centers it calls Spark in its own facilities, loading them onto flatbed trucks and deploying them wherever large power sources are available — a way to add capacity quickly without the large construction workforces, delays and community backlash that have slowed massive data-center projects.

The shift tracks a change in how AI companies want to buy computing. Giant clusters with hundreds of thousands of chips have proved useful for training the most sophisticated models, but serving those models to users — inference — can often be done with considerably smaller amounts of chips. "You don't actually need an Abilene to do that," chief executive Chase Lochmiller said. "Running inference from such a facility can be a bit of overkill."

Crusoe makes money three ways: leasing data-center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling the compute power used to run AI models. The company said it has more than 6 gigawatts of contracted capacity, with 1 gigawatt already operational.

The money trail

The new valuation is roughly triple the $10 billion mark Crusoe set just ten months ago, when it raised $1.38 billion last October. Since then the company has stacked up demand signals: Bloomberg reported a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, and Axios reported last month that Crusoe had met with bankers including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO.

Crusoe also announced three new board members: Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and Redwood Materials founder and chief executive JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla's board. Straubel invested in Crusoe personally in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood's energy storage business. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.

"We believe AI will usher in an era of abundance," Lochmiller said in a statement. "Getting there means controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and we're grateful to have investors who share that conviction."

What to watch

The raise lands in the middle of a full-scale land grab for AI capacity. Reuters noted that Blackstone and Alphabet's AI cloud venture Crux AI secured a $22 billion chip loan alongside an initial $5 billion equity investment from Blackstone — the latest sign of how much capital is chasing the same bottleneck Crusoe is selling into.

The question for Crusoe is execution: converting $140 billion of contracted value into operating megawatts, at a valuation that now demands it. The Spark strategy is the company's answer — smaller, faster, and sited where the power already is. If inference demand grows the way Lochmiller expects, the neocloud that started out mining crypto on flared gas will have timed the pivot of the decade.