AI data center builder Crusoe valued at $30.9B in $3.9B round

Crusoe Inc. today announced that it has closed a $3.9 billion late-stage funding round at a $30.9 billion valuation.

The Series F deal was led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. They were joined by more than two dozen other investors. The group included Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Ventures and Robinhood Ventures Fund.

Denver-based Crusoe builds artificial intelligence data centers for tech firms. Its flagship project is a 1.2-gigawatt AI campus in Abilene, Texas that Oracle Corp. will use to host workloads for OpenAI Group PBC. Crusoe is also building a 900-megawatt site for Microsoft Corp. nearby.

The company makes many of the electrical components that power its data centers in-house. Crusoe manufactures, among others, industrial controls that coordinate the flow of electricity and circuit breakers. It also makes the specialized enclosures in which such components are housed. The cabinets protect electrical equipment from dust and water.

Crusoe customers who don’t require a full data center can purchase a computing module called Spark. It combines graphics cards, storage equipment and cooling systems in a container-size enclosure. Built-in satellite connectivity enables Spark systems to run in areas that lack terrestrial networking infrastructure.

The company offers its data center construction services alongside an AI-optimized cloud platform called Crusoe Cloud. It says the platform’s annualized revenue has increased by a factor of more than 20 over the past year. One of the main drivers behind that growth is a service called Managed Inference. Crusoe says the annualized recurring revenue generated by the service offering topped $100 million within a year of its launch.

Managed Inference enables users to run AI models without managing the underlying hardware. A software engine called MemoryAlloy caches data that is frequently reused by customers’ models. That removes the need to generate the data from scratch for every user request, which speeds up processing. Crusoe claims that the technology can provide a fivefold throughput increase for some workloads.

Managed Inference is available alongside Serverless Fine-Tuning, a service that developers can use to customize open-source AI models. Crusoe Cloud ingests the training datasets needed for the task from sources such as Amazon S3. It keeps the information in storage hardware developed by a startup called Vast Data Inc. Crusoe says its infrastructure can accommodate petabytes of training data.

The company disclosed today that it has more than 6 gigawatts of contracted data center capacity in the works. According to the Wall Street Journal, some of that capacity will be located at a campus the company is building for Google LLC in Texas. Crusoe says its data center projects represent more than $140 billion in contracted revenue. 

Photo: Crusoe