Data center developer Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in a new funding round, giving the company a valuation of $30.9 billion and underscoring the enormous capital flowing into infrastructure needed to support the artificial intelligence boom.
The eight-year-old company said Thursday that its Series F round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG also participated.
The funding comes as AI companies and cloud providers race to secure the computing capacity, power and data center infrastructure required to train and operate increasingly demanding AI models. For Crusoe, the latest investment marks a significant jump from the $10 billion valuation it received when it raised $1.38 billion in October.
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Crusoe said the new capital will finance its existing data center projects, including its large facility in Abilene, Texas, which is being used by OpenAI. It will also support the company’s smaller modular data centers, known as Spark, which can be manufactured at Crusoe’s facilities and transported by truck to locations with access to large power sources.
That approach is aimed at addressing one of the biggest constraints facing the AI infrastructure industry: how quickly computing capacity can be brought online.
Traditional data centers can require lengthy construction projects, large workforces, and extensive local infrastructure. Crusoe’s modular approach allows the company to manufacture smaller computing facilities away from the eventual deployment site and install them where power is available.
The strategy is also expected to help the company navigate growing resistance from communities concerned about the size, electricity consumption and infrastructure demands of large data center developments.
Crusoe co-founder and CEO said AI could usher in an era of abundance, but achieving that would require controlling the infrastructure supporting AI systems “from electrons to tokens.” The company said its latest investors share that view.
The economics of AI infrastructure
Crusoe has developed a business model that spans several layers of the AI computing market. The company leases data center capacity to customers that bring their own GPUs, rents its own GPUs to customers, and sells computing capacity used to run AI models, a process known as inference.
The combination has helped Crusoe emerge as one of the most valuable privately held AI infrastructure companies as demand for computing continues to expand.
The company recently signed a reported $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to provide GPUs and AI infrastructure to quantitative trading firm Jane Street, according to Bloomberg. Its customers also include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. The business has changed considerably since Crusoe was founded in 2018. The company initially focused on cryptocurrency mining powered by natural gas that otherwise would have been flared.
As demand for AI computing accelerated, Crusoe shifted toward data centers and AI infrastructure, putting it at the center of a much larger investment cycle.
The latest financing shows how dramatically the value of AI infrastructure businesses has increased. Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation only 10 months ago. Its new valuation of $30.9 billion represents more than a threefold increase in the company’s valuation over that period.
The funding also brings major technology and institutional investors into Crusoe’s ownership structure. Nvidia, whose processors remain central to AI data center deployments, participated alongside sovereign wealth and institutional investors including Mubadala, GIC and QIA.
Nvidia’s participation is relevant as the AI infrastructure market expands beyond chips to the power, networking, cooling and data center systems needed to deploy them at scale.
Crusoe’s modular facilities could become increasingly relevant as conventional data center construction struggles to keep pace with demand. AI workloads require large concentrations of GPUs and substantial electricity supplies, creating pressure on developers to find locations where power can be secured quickly.
The company is betting that speed and flexibility will become more valuable as AI companies continue expanding their computing footprints.
Crusoe has also begun preparing for a potential transition from private markets to public markets. The company recently met with investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a possible initial public offering, Axios reported last month.
A potential IPO would give public-market investors exposure to an AI infrastructure company whose revenues are tied not only to demand for data center space but also to the broader growth of AI computing. For now, however, the $3.9 billion financing gives Crusoe substantial private capital to continue expanding without relying on the public markets.
The company also announced three new board members alongside the funding. They include Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer of Cloudflare; Bill Stein, partner and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and a member of Tesla’s board.
Straubel already has a relationship with Crusoe. He personally invested in the company in 2021, while Crusoe subsequently became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.
The connection highlights another issue emerging alongside the AI data center boom: computing capacity is increasingly intertwined with energy infrastructure.
Crusoe’s original business was built around using otherwise wasted natural gas to generate power for cryptocurrency mining. Its current business is focused on providing the computing infrastructure needed by AI companies, but the underlying challenge remains closely connected to energy availability.
As AI models become more computationally intensive, the ability to secure electricity and deploy computing equipment quickly is becoming as important to the industry as access to advanced processors.
Therefore, Crusoe’s latest funding round is seen as another signal of continued investor appetite for the physical infrastructure underneath the AI economy, at a time when the industry is spending heavily to expand computing capacity and secure the power needed to operate it.