Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers reportedly leased from Oracle, Microsoft and OpenAI, is raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing.
Crusoe has secured $686 million of the total $818 million it hopes to raise, according to the filing. According to the filing, 70 investors have invested in this tranche so far.
“Companies in the growth stage are constantly interacting with investors,” a Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Crusoe was in talks to raise about $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from Felicis Ventures. Investors likely wanted a larger tranche, likely at a higher valuation than the rumored $3 billion — already double Crusoe's previous valuation.
If Crusoe is successful in raising $818 million, the startup's total funding will be approximately $1.5 billion in equity and debt. Late last year, Crusoe secured $200 million in debt using data center chips as collateral to purchase thousands of AI processors.
Crusoe launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency business that uses natural gas to power its data centers, which will then be “burned out” and disposed of. Like many crypto mining operations, Crusoe pivoted with the rise of AI, signing deals with AI companies to provide high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.
In early October, Crusoe announced a $3.4 billion joint venture with asset management firm Blue Owl Capital to build a large data center in Abilene, Texas. The campus will be leased to Oracle, which will lease it to Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI.
There is a booming market of “neocloud” startups building low-cost, on-demand clouds for AI.
GPU infrastructure provider CoreWeave says it has an impressive $12.7 billion in available funds, including about $10 billion in debt and about $3 billion in equity. Lambda Institute secured up to $500 million in special purpose financing facilities in early April. Voltage Park, a nonprofit backed by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb, announced last October that it would invest $500 million in GPU-powered data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also does generative AI research, raised $106 million in a Salesforce-led round in March.
The environmental impact of building an extension can be significant. IDC predicts that global data center power consumption will more than double between 2023 and 2028. Additionally, data center technology suppliers are expected to generate the equivalent of 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, according to Morgan Stanley.
Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller recently suggested in an interview that AI is indeed the solution to the AI energy crisis.
“There are various complaints about AI’s energy usage, but [but] The answer to AI energy use is AI,” he told SiliconAngle analyst Dave Vellante. “AI is the tool we have been looking for that can drive the scientific advances needed to realize a low-cost, sustainable power future.”