Crusoe, a rumored OpenAI data center supplier, has secured $686M in new funds, filing shows

Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers reportedly to be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is in the process of raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing.

The filing indicates that Crusoe has secured $686 million of the $818 million total that it hopes to raise. Seventy investors have contributed to the tranche so far, per the filing.

“A company at our stage of growth is always talking to investors,” a spokesperson for Crusoe told TechCrunch.

The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Crusoe was in talks to raise roughly $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Felicis Ventures. It seems investors had an appetite for a larger tranche, which presumably would come at a higher valuation than the rumored $3 billion — which was already double Crusoe’s previous valuation.

Should Crusoe successfully raise $818 million, it would bring the startup’s total raised to approximately $1.5 billion in equity and debt. Late last year, Crusoe secured $200 million in debt using its data center chips as collateral to buy thousands of AI processors.

Crusoe launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency business, powering its data centers with natural gas that would otherwise be “flared off” and wasted. Like many crypto mining operations, Crusoe pivoted as AI rose to prominence, securing deals with AI companies to provide high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.

In early October, Crusoe announced it would enter into a $3.4 billion joint venture with asset manager Blue Owl Capital to build a massive data center in Abilene, Texas. The campus is expected to be leased to Oracle, which will in turn rent it to Microsoft and its close collaborator, OpenAI.

There’s a booming market for “neocloud” startups building low-cost, on-demand clouds for AI.

CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider, says that it’s stockpiled a jaw-dropping $12.7 billion in available funds, including nearly $10 billion in debt and nearly $3 billion in equity. Lambda Labs in early April secured a special-purpose financing vehicle of up to $500 million. The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it’s investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts generative AI research, in March landed $106 million in a Salesforce-led round.

The environmental impact of the build-outs could be substantial. IDC expects global data center electricity consumption to more than double between 2023 and 2028. And according to Morgan Stanley, data center tech suppliers will create emissions equivalent to 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.

Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller recently suggested in an interview that AI is, in fact, the solution to the AI energy crises.

“There’s all these gripes about AI’s energy usage, [but] the solution to AI’s energy usage is AI,” he told SiliconAngle analyst Dave Vellante. “AI is the tool that we’ve been looking for that’s going to be able to drive these scientific breakthroughs that we need to achieve low-cost, sustainably-powered futures.”

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