Data center developer Crusoe announced Thursday that it has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round, raising the company’s valuation to $30.9 billion. This large round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures and TPG also participated, Crusoe said.
Crusoe also announced three new board members, including Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert. Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure. JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials, is also a member of Tesla’s board of directors. Strobel already has a relationship with Crusoe. He personally invested in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became Redwood’s first customer for its energy storage business.
The new capital injection for the eight-year-old company will help finance existing data center projects, including OpenAI’s large site in Abilene, Texas, and a small modular AI factory that can be transported by truck and connected to large-scale power almost anywhere.
By manufacturing these modular data centers, called Spark, in its own facilities, Crusoe can quickly deploy computing power without the need for large construction crews. A smaller center could also help Crusoe at least partially avoid another major obstacle faced by data center developers: backlash from local communities protesting large complexes in their neighborhoods.
Crusoe co-founder and CEO Chase Rochmiller (pictured above) said in a statement that he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, but that getting there “requires control of the infrastructure, from electronics to tokens, and we are grateful to investors who share that belief.”
The company makes money by leasing data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, renting its own GPUs, and selling the computing power used to run AI models, known as inference.
This three-pronged business model has made Crusoe one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies. According to a report from Bloomberg, Crusoe recently signed a massive five-year, $13 billion cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPU and AI infrastructure.
The company recently met with investment bankers including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss the possibility of an IPO in the near future, Axios reported last month.
The new funding comes 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October.
The company was founded in 2018 as a cryptocurrency mining operation powered by flared natural gas, but pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power soared. Crusoe’s customers include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
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