Crusoe Seeks $3 Billion to Triple Its Value

Crusoe, the data center builder that supplies computing power to some of the largest names in artificial intelligence, is in talks to raise about $3 billion in a round that could value the company near $30 billion, according to Bloomberg. That figure would roughly triple the roughly $10 billion valuation the company carried last October. Talks are still live and the final number has not been set.

The company has an unusual origin. Crusoe started out capturing stranded natural gas at oil fields to mine bitcoin, then pivoted the same instinct, cheap power in the right place, toward the AI buildout. It now assembles modular data centers from prefabricated racks, power and cooling, and runs an AI-focused cloud with Nvidia and AMD chips. Prior backers include Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, according to SiliconANGLE.

Building for the giants

Crusoe's customer list is the real story. The company is constructing a 1.2-gigawatt data center cluster for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas, where two of eight planned buildings are already running. Meta has contracted for two more Crusoe sites, in Texas and Missouri. In June the company said it held contracts for 4.9 gigawatts of computing power, with more than 40 gigawatts in its total project pipeline, as The Next Web reported.

Those numbers explain the valuation and, at the same time, the nervousness around it. A company tripling its worth in nine months on the strength of long-term buildout contracts is exactly the kind of dependency that financial regulators have started to eye warily. Crusoe sits at the junction of two of the pressure points named this week in a leaked Treasury draft: the firms financing data center construction and the utilities being asked to power them. We covered that report in Treasury's Own Analysts Warn of an AI Bubble.

For now, the capital keeps flowing toward whoever can pour concrete and secure megawatts fastest. Crusoe has been good at both. Whether the demand it is building against holds up is the question hanging over the entire sector, not just this one raise.