Crusoe said on Thursday it closed a $3.9 billion Series F financing round that lifts the company's valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Other participants included Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures and TPG.
New board members
The company also named three new board members: Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer of Cloudflare; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and a member of Tesla’s board. Straubel has prior ties to Crusoe, having personally invested in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.
Use of proceeds: large sites and modular AI centers
The fresh capital will finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, which is used by OpenAI, as well as smaller, modular AI facilities called Spark. These Spark units are designed to be transportable by truck and to connect to large power sources in diverse locations. By manufacturing the Spark modular centers at its own facilities, Crusoe says it can deploy compute capacity rapidly without requiring large construction workforces.
The smaller, transportable centers may also help Crusoe reduce exposure to local pushback that often accompanies massive data center complexes near communities.
Business model and customers
Crusoe operates a three-pronged business model: it leases data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, it rents out its own GPUs, and it sells compute power used for running AI models (inference). This mix of revenue streams has contributed to Crusoe becoming one of the more valuable companies in the AI infrastructure space.
Customers mentioned include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.
Large contracts and IPO discussions
Bloomberg reported that Crusoe recently signed a large $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply the quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure.
Axios reported last month that the company has met with investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to discuss a potential initial public offering in the near future.
From flared gas crypto-mining to AI infrastructure
Founded in 2018 as a crypto-mining operation powered by flared natural gas, Crusoe pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power surged. Ten months before the current round, in October, the company raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation.
