Crusoe announced a $3.9 billion Series F financing that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures and TPG.
Board changes and investor ties
The company also named three new board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and a Tesla board member. Crusoe noted Straubel previously invested in the company in 2021 and that Crusoe became the first customer of Redwood Materials’ energy storage business.
Projects and modular deployments
Crusoe said the fresh capital will fund existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas that is used by OpenAI, and smaller, truck-transportable modular units called Spark. The company said manufacturing Spark at its own facilities allows faster deployment of compute capacity without large construction workforces and enables connection to sizable power sources in varied locations.
Crusoe indicated the smaller modular centers may also reduce friction with local communities that have pushed back against very large data center complexes.
Business model and contracts
The company described a three-pronged business model: leasing data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs; renting out Crusoe’s own GPUs; and selling compute power used for running AI models (inference). Crusoe said this approach has helped drive its market position among AI infrastructure providers.
Bloomberg reported that Crusoe signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and infrastructure. Axios reported the company has met with investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential initial public offering.
Founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation using flared natural gas, Crusoe pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power increased. The company raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October, and lists customers such as Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.
Original source: TechCrunch AI