Crusoe raises $3.9B for data centers and modular AI factories
Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F financing round, bringing its valuation to $30.9 billion. The data center developer said the round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, with Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG among the participants.
The company will use the capital to finance existing data center projects, including a large facility in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI. It also plans to expand its smaller modular data centers, marketed as Spark AI factories.
Capital for fixed sites and portable capacity
Crusoe manufactures Spark units at its own facilities. The modular centers can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources in a range of locations. Crusoe says that manufacturing the units itself enables faster deployment of compute capacity without relying on large construction workforces.
The approach sits alongside the company’s development of large data center campuses. Smaller deployable facilities may also partly address local opposition that can arise when developers propose large complexes near residential communities.
The scale of this round follows Crusoe’s prior $3 billion funding round and shows that Crusoe is continuing to finance both conventional data center projects and modular AI capacity.
A three-part infrastructure business
Crusoe generates revenue by leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling inference compute for running AI models. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.
The company recently signed a reported five-year, $13 billion cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure. Bloomberg reported the agreement, while Axios reported that Crusoe had met Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO.
Board additions and a shift from crypto
Crusoe also named three new board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel. Straubel invested personally in Crusoe in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.
Founded in 2018 as a crypto-mining operation powered by flared natural gas, Crusoe shifted toward AI infrastructure as demand for computing power increased. For businesses procuring AI capacity, the funding highlights the value of examining whether a provider can combine site development, GPU access and inference services with a deployment model suited to available power and project constraints.