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

Crusoe Inc., an AI data center builder based in Denver, has recently completed a $3.9 billion funding round, which has elevated its valuation to $30.9 billion. The significant investment was orchestrated by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, along with additional contributions from over two dozen other investors, including tech giants Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Ventures, and Robinhood Ventures Fund.

Crusoe specializes in constructing artificial intelligence data centers for major tech companies. Their most notable project is a 1.2-gigawatt AI campus in Abilene, Texas, which is set to host workloads for OpenAI Group PBC. In addition, Crusoe is constructing a 900-megawatt site for Microsoft Corp. nearby.

The company takes pride in manufacturing many of the electrical components that power its data centers in-house, including industrial controls, circuit breakers, and specialized enclosures that house these components and protect them from dust and water. Crusoe offers customers the option to purchase computing modules, called Spark, which include graphics cards, storage equipment, and cooling systems in a compact, container-sized enclosure.

This enables Spark systems to function in areas without terrestrial networking infrastructure due to its built-in satellite connectivity.

Crusoe's data center construction services are complemented by an AI-optimized cloud platform known as Crusoe Cloud. The platform's annualized revenue has surged more than 20 times over the past year, with Managed Inference, a key driver of this growth, generating over $100 million in annualized recurring revenue within a year of its launch.

Managed Inference allows users to run AI models without managing the underlying hardware by employing a software engine called MemoryAlloy, which caches frequently reused data, thus eliminating the need to generate the data from scratch for every user request and speeding up processing.

MemoryAlloy is accompanied by Serverless Fine-Tuning, a service that enables developers to customize open-source AI models. Crusoe Cloud acquires the training datasets required for this customization from sources like Amazon S3 and stores them in hardware developed by Vast Data Inc. Crusoe asserts that its infrastructure can accommodate petabytes of training data.

Crusoe has disclosed plans to secure more than 6 gigawatts of contracted data center capacity in the near future. The Wall Street Journal reported that some of this capacity will be allocated at a campus Crusoe is constructing for Google LLC in Texas. The company claims that its data center projects collectively represent over $140 billion in contracted revenue.