AI

Crusoe Raises $3.9 Billion as OpenAI’s Stargate Partner Hits a $30.9 Billion Valuation

co-written by newsrooms.ai18. September 2026, 04:38

Crusoe, the U.S. data center developer, has just announced a $3.9 billion Series F funding round that lifts its post-money valuation to $30.9 billion. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures and TPG also participated, along with a long list of other investors including Altimeter, ARK Invest, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Salesforce Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital.

The jump is remarkable. Roughly a year ago, Crusoe raised $1.38 billion in a Series E at a $10 billion valuation. That means the company has roughly tripled its value in just ten months.

From Bitcoin Mining to AI Factories

The company’s roots lie in a very different business. Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness founded Crusoe in 2018 to mine Bitcoin using natural gas that oil producers would otherwise flare. Instead of letting the excess gas burn off at well sites, Crusoe converted it into electricity on location and used it to power mobile mining containers. As generative AI took off, the startup shifted its focus to data centers built for AI workloads and eventually exited crypto mining altogether.

What remains from those early days is an energy-first strategy. Crusoe starts by securing sites with available power and then builds its data centers around them. To do so, the company develops its own power plants and partners with providers across the grid, battery storage, nuclear, thermal and renewable energy.

Stargate, Meta and Jane Street

Crusoe rose to prominence largely through its role in OpenAI’s Stargate AI infrastructure project. The company designed and built the massive data center campus in Abilene, Texas, widely regarded as Stargate’s first site and used by OpenAI together with Oracle. Part of the new funding will go toward existing projects such as Abilene.

Crusoe’s customers also include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. According to the company, AI firms such as Cognition, Figure and Perplexity run on its own platform, Crusoe Cloud. Just recently, Crusoe signed a five-year cloud contract worth roughly $13 billion with high-frequency trading firm Jane Street, which will source GPUs and AI infrastructure from Crusoe, Bloomberg reported.

In total, Crusoe puts its total contracted value at more than $140 billion. Contracted capacity stands at over 6 gigawatts, of which about 1 gigawatt is already operational. Crusoe Cloud bookings have reportedly grown more than twentyfold year over year so far this year.

Three Revenue Streams and Modular Data Centers

Crusoe makes money in three ways: it leases data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, it rents out its own GPUs, and it sells computing power for running AI models, known as inference. Its Crusoe Managed Inference product, launched late last year, has reportedly already contracted more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Another focus of the new round is Crusoe Spark, the company’s line of modular data centers. Crusoe manufactures these units at its own facilities in the U.S. They can be shipped by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere. According to Crusoe, this cuts on-site construction time from years to weeks and requires far smaller construction crews. The smaller units could also help the company sidestep local opposition, which has increasingly targeted massive data center complexes across the U.S.

“Getting there means controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens,” said CEO Chase Lochmiller, who believes AI will usher in an era of abundance. Gavin Baker, CIO of Atreides Management, made a similar case, arguing that the economics of AI will ultimately flow to the lowest-cost producer of intelligence and that Crusoe’s vertical integration gives it a structural advantage.

New Board Members and IPO Plans

Alongside the funding, Crusoe appointed three new members to its board of directors: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and a member of Tesla’s board. Straubel has long-standing ties to Crusoe. He personally invested in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.

Crusoe now employs more than 1,800 people across five countries and recently opened new offices in Bellevue, Washington, and New York City. A public listing could be next. According to Axios, the company has already met with investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to discuss a potential IPO.