Crusoe closes $3.9B Series F; valuation jumps to $30.9B

Data-center developer Crusoe announced a $3.9 billion Series F round that lifts its valuation to $30.9 billion. Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners co-led the round, with participation from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, QIA, Radical Ventures and TPG. The company also added three directors: Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer of Cloudflare; Bill Stein, partner and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and chief executive of Redwood Materials and a Tesla board member. Straubel invested in Crusoe in 2021, and the startup became the first customer of Redwood's energy-storage business.

The fresh capital will fund existing projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, and accelerate deployment of modular data centers called Spark. Built in Crusoe's own facilities, the units are truck-transportable and can plug into large power sources almost anywhere. The approach enables rapid compute rollout without massive construction crews and partly sidesteps community opposition that stalls massive complexes near residential areas. Chief executive and co-founder Chase Lochmiller said he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, but the path runs through "controlling infrastructure from electrons to tokens."

Crusoe operates three revenue streams: leasing data-center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, leasing its own GPUs, and selling compute for model inference. That triple model has made it one of the highest-valued AI infrastructure companies. Bloomberg reported the company recently signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract to supply GPUs and AI infrastructure to quantitative trading firm Jane Street. Other customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.

Founded in 2018 as a crypto-mining operation powered by flared natural gas, Crusoe pivoted to AI infrastructure when compute demand surged. The latest raise comes just ten months after a $1.38 billion round at a $10 billion valuation in October last year. Axios reported Crusoe has recently met with investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to explore a near-term public offering.