Crusoe raises $3.9B for data centers and modular 'AI factories'

Crusoe, a developer of AI data-center infrastructure, 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.

The eight-year-old company also announced 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 already has ties to Crusoe — he personally invested in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.

The fresh capital will help finance existing data-center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as smaller, modular “AI factories” — called Spark — that can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere. By manufacturing the modular centers at its own facilities, Crusoe can deploy compute capacity quickly and without large construction workforces; the smaller footprint could also help the company sidestep, at least in part, local-community backlash against massive data-center complexes.

Crusoe makes money by leasing data-center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, by renting out its own GPUs, and by selling compute power for AI inference — a three-pronged model that has helped make it one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies. The company recently signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported, and met with investment bankers including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO, Axios reported last month. The new round comes 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October. Crusoe co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller said in a statement he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, but achieving it will mean “controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and we’re grateful to have investors who share that conviction.”

Why it matters

The pace of the round — coming 10 months after a $1.38 billion raise at a $10 billion valuation — underscores how quickly investor demand for AI infrastructure capital has grown.