Crusoe raises $3.9bn and starts trucking data centres to spare power

“Getting there means controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens,” said Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and chief executive of Crusoe. He was describing what he called an era of abundance brought by AI.

The Denver company announced the initial closing of a $3.9bn Series F on 17 September, in a statement. It puts the post-money valuation at $30.9bn. Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners co-led the round, which Crusoe called oversubscribed.

Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG also took part. The list of further investors runs to 29 names. It includes ARK Invest, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Global and the research firm SemiAnalysis.

TNW reported in July that Crusoe was in talks to raise $3bn. The round closed higher.

Small boxes, not just big campuses

Crusoe built the Abilene data centre campus in Texas where OpenAI trained Astra, the company said. Its next bet is on much smaller sites.

Crusoe makes modular data centres, called Spark, in its own factories. It then trucks them to places with available power, the Wall Street Journal reported. That cuts construction in the field from years to weeks, Crusoe said.

Serving a model to users needs far fewer chips than training one. “You don’t actually need an Abilene to do that,” Lochmiller told the Journal. Running inference from such a site “can be a bit of overkill”, he said.

A plant outside Denver will eventually make up to a gigawatt of Spark capacity a year, he said. Units already run in Reno, Nevada, on old electric car batteries and solar panels.

The numbers Crusoe gives

Crusoe reports more than $140bn in total contracted value. It also claims more than 6GW of gross contracted capacity, of which 1GW is operational, and cloud bookings up more than 20 times year on year.

Its managed inference product launched late last year. It has passed $100m in contracted annual recurring revenue, the company said. That business went from almost no revenue at the start of 2026 to that run rate by the summer, Lochmiller told the Journal.

Crusoe employs more than 1,800 people across five countries. It has opened offices in Bellevue and New York. The company earns money at three layers. “We sell data centres, GPUs and tokens,” Lochmiller told the Journal.

The strategy has at times unsettled Crusoe’s board, which has suggested narrowing the focus, the Journal reported, citing people with knowledge of the conversations.

Three new directors

Crusoe named three independent directors on the same day. They are Cloudflare’s chief financial officer Thomas Seifert, the former Digital Realty chief executive Bill Stein, and Redwood Materials founder JB Straubel.

Seifert will chair the audit committee. Straubel co-founded Tesla and was its chief technology officer until 2019. Redwood Materials, which he now runs, supplies the microgrid of solar and repurposed EV batteries that powers Spark units. TNW covered Redwood’s energy pivot in May.

“Grid demand is growing faster than infrastructure can keep up, and that bottleneck is real for AI,” Straubel said. He said the answer was to build energy systems at the point of use.

Others are chasing the same gap. TAR raised $120m at a $1bn valuation for off-grid AI power on 10 September. Crusoe itself signed a $13bn cloud deal with Jane Street this month.