Data center developer Crusoe announced Thursday it secured $3.9 billion in a Series F funding round that brings the company's valuation to $30.9 billion, according to a report published by TechCrunch. The enormous investment round was jointly led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with backing from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG. The capital will finance ongoing data center projects and the rollout of smaller, truck-transportable modular facilities designed to connect with major power sources in diverse locations.
The eight-year-old firm will use the fresh funding to expand existing sites, including a large Abilene, Texas facility serving OpenAI, as well as its modular AI factories called Spark. These smaller units can be manufactured at Crusoe's own plants and deployed rapidly without requiring large construction crews. The company generates revenue through three streams: leasing data center space to clients who supply their own GPUs, renting its own GPU hardware, and selling inference compute power for running AI models. Crusoe recently inked a massive $13 billion, five-year cloud contract with quantitative trading firm Jane Street to provide GPUs and AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. The fundraise arrives 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October, and the company has met with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to explore a potential IPO in the near term, Axios reported last month.
Co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller said in a statement he believes AI will bring an era of abundance, but achieving that goal requires "controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens." The company also added three board members: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Bill Stein from Primary Digital Infrastructure, and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and a Tesla board member. Straubel invested personally in Crusoe in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood's energy storage operation. Crusoe was founded in 2018 as a cryptocurrency mining business powered by flared natural gas before shifting to AI infrastructure as computing demand surged, and its clients now include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
The modular approach could help Crusoe avoid another major hurdle facing data center developers: pushback from local communities objecting to massive complexes near residential areas. By building compact, transportable units that can be positioned near any substantial power source, the company can deploy capacity faster and with less reliance on site-specific construction. This three-part business model has positioned Crusoe as one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies in the market. The strategic flexibility offered by modular units and the company's vertical integration—from power sourcing through compute delivery—addresses both supply chain bottlenecks and community relations challenges that have slowed competitors. Investors backing this round appear to be betting that controlling the full stack, from energy to AI output, will be critical as demand for compute continues to accelerate and traditional data center development timelines stretch longer.