Crusoe Raises $3.9 Billion as OpenAI’s Stargate Partner Hits a $30.9 Billion Valuation
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 2 sources
Crusoe just raised $3.9 billion and is now worth $30.9 billion. The AI data center builder went from crypto roots to OpenAI’s Stargate work in about ten months.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Crusoe has landed a $3.9 billion Series F, and the price tag that comes with it is hard to ignore: a $30.9 billion post-money valuation. The round was oversubscribed and co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG were in too, alongside names like Fidelity, Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital.
That’s a huge jump from where Crusoe stood only about a year ago. In its Series E, the company raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation. So the market has roughly tripled its value in around ten months, which tells you how quickly AI infrastructure has become a place where investors are willing to write very large checks.
Crusoe didn’t start here. Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness founded it in 2018 to mine Bitcoin using natural gas that oil producers would otherwise flare. The company turned that wasted gas into electricity on site and ran mobile mining containers on top of it. Later, as generative AI took off, Crusoe shifted into data centers for AI workloads and left crypto mining behind.
What makes Crusoe different now is the infrastructure-first approach. It looks for sites with power first, then builds around them, developing its own power plants and working with grid, battery storage, nuclear, thermal and renewable providers. That strategy helped it win a central role in OpenAI’s Stargate project, including the big campus in Abilene, Texas, which Crusoe designed and built and which OpenAI uses with Oracle. Some of the new money will go back into projects like Abilene.
The company says it has more than $140 billion in total contracted value, over 6 gigawatts of contracted capacity and about 1 gigawatt already operational. It also says Crusoe Cloud bookings are up more than twentyfold year over year so far this year. One new cloud contract stands out: Jane Street signed a five-year deal worth roughly $13 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Crusoe is also pushing modular data centers through Crusoe Spark, which are built in its own U.S. facilities, trucked out and connected near large power sources. The company says that cuts build time from years to weeks. With more than 1,800 employees across five countries and new offices in Bellevue and New York City, Crusoe is now acting like a company that expects to stay large for a while. It has also reportedly met with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about a possible IPO.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Crusoe is becoming the kind of company that proves the AI boom is mostly an electricity-and-real-estate story with better branding. The vertical integration pitch is smart, but it also shows how far the market will go for anyone who can stack power, GPUs and hype into one neat package. This is what happens when every model builder wants a factory and every factory wants a ticker symbol.
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