Crusoe raises $3.9B at a $30.9B valuation to build mega data centers and modular AI factories

Data center developer Crusoe said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, with Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG also participating, according to the company.

Alongside the capital, Crusoe 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, 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.

The fresh money will finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as smaller modular AI factories.

Those modular data centers, called Spark, are manufactured in Crusoe's own facilities. They can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere, letting the company deploy compute quickly without large construction workforces. The smaller footprint could also help Crusoe sidestep, at least in part, community backlash against massive complexes built near homes.

Crusoe makes money three ways: leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling the inference compute used to run AI models. That combination has made it one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies.

Business momentum has been fast. Crusoe recently signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. The company has also met with investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to discuss a potential IPO in the near future, Axios reported last month.

The round lands just 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October.

Founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas, Crusoe pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power skyrocketed. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. In under a year its valuation has moved from $10 billion to $30.9 billion, making it one of the most sought-after assets in the AI buildout.

In a statement, the co-founder and CEO said he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, but that getting there will mean controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and that he is grateful for investors who share that conviction.