- Crusoe is in talks to raise $3B at a $30B valuation, nearly tripling its October 2025 valuation
- The Denver firm pivoted from flared-gas crypto mining to owning full AI data centre campuses
- Its full-stack model, owning power, construction and cloud ops, sets it apart from rivals
AI infrastructure startup Crusoe is reportedly in talks to raise about $3 billion at a valuation of roughly $30 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. If it closes, the round would nearly triple the $10 billion valuation Crusoe reached in October 2025 off the back of a $1.38 billion Series E co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Capital.
That earlier round itself came only a year after Crusoe raised $600 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. Three valuation markers in roughly two years, each several times the last, are unusual even by the standards of the AI infrastructure sector, where capital is moving faster than almost anywhere else in tech.
From flared gas to full-stack AI campuses
Tech Funding News has tracked Crusoe’s trajectory since 2022, when it was known mainly for turning natural gas that would otherwise be flared at remote oil wells into electricity for Bitcoin mining.
Founded in 2018 by chief executive Chase Lochmiller and chief operating officer Cully Cavness, the company has since exited crypto entirely and redirected its energy expertise toward AI-native data centres.
That shift now defines the business. Crusoe designs and operates AI campuses that combine high-performance computing, power generation, cooling, and cloud services, rather than leasing GPU capacity from someone else’s facility.
Its highest-profile project is the Abilene, Texas campus, a nearly one-million-square-foot site built for OpenAI and Oracle that forms the first phase of the Stargate initiative, envisioned at $500 billion in AI data centre spending and also backed by SoftBank. Crusoe has additional projects underway in Wyoming and Alberta, Canada.
Why owning the whole stack matters
Building frontier AI models increasingly depends on more than chips. It requires electricity, land, cooling, and networking capacity at a scale that’s becoming genuinely scarce, and that scarcity is a major driver of upward valuations across the sector.
Crusoe’s specific bet is that owning every layer, power infrastructure, construction, and cloud operations, gives it more control over that bottleneck than rivals who lease pieces of it. That puts it in a different company than its closest competitors.
CoreWeave went public on Nasdaq in March 2025 and has since signed contracts worth tens of billions with Meta and Nvidia, but relies heavily on partner capacity and financing rather than owning full sites outright. Lambda signed a $1.5 billion GPU leasing agreement with Nvidia ahead of a possible IPO, and Nebius, after securing a $2 billion investment from Nvidia, is expanding through a mix of owned and leased sites across the US, UK, and Israel.
Whether Crusoe’s reported round actually closes at $30 billion remains to be seen. But the pace of the increase, tripling in under a year, is itself a signal that investors are betting as much on who controls the physical infrastructure behind AI as on who builds the models running on top of it.
