AI data center builder Crusoe reportedly raising $3B at $30B valuation

Data center builder Crusoe Inc. is reportedly in talks to raise a $3 billion funding round.

Bloomberg on Thursday cited sources as saying that the deal could value the company at $30 billion. That’s about three times what Crusoe was worth last year.

The report didn’t name the investors that may participate in the new raise, but late-stage rounds often draw contributions from existing backers. Crusoe’s last funding round included the participation of Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Ventures and more than a dozen others. The company has raised a total of $2.77 billion to date.

Crusoe builds data centers for major tech firms such as Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and OpenAI Group PBC. According to Bloomberg, Meta Platforms Inc. is also a customer. The social media giant has reportedly signed contracts to use two Crusoe data centers undergoing construction in Texas and Missouri.

The startup’s flagship project is a 1.2-gigawatt data center cluster that it’s building for OpenAI. The Abilene, Texas site is the ChatGPT developer’s largest Stargate campus. In June, Crusoe disclosed that two of the eight buildings on the site are operational.

The company assembles customer data centers from prefabricated modules. Each module ships with server racks, power management components and cooling equipment. Crusoe also helps customers with tasks such as connecting a newly built data center to the grid.

Crusoe ships its hardware with a management platform called Command Center. The software can detect when an AI server fails and automatically replace it with a spare machine. Command Center uses Kubernetes and Slurm, an open-source infrastructure automation tool, to manage hardware resources. 

The company says its one-stop-shop approach significantly speeds up infrastructure projects. Crusoe claims that it can build a new data center in months instead of the years the task often requires.

Besides building infrastructure for other companies, Crusoe also operates its own AI-optimized public cloud. The platform offers a half-dozen graphics card models from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Companies with latency-sensitive workloads can commission miniature cloud facilities called Edge Zones that Crusoe builds near end-users.

In March, the company opened a factory that will make the prefabricated modules from which its data centers are assembled. Crusoe stated at the time that the plant would ship its first modules in the current quarter. It’s possible the company will use the $3 billion funding round that it’s reportedly raising to ramp up production. 

Photo: Crusoe