Crusoe Seeks $3 Billion at $30 Billion Valuation as AI Data Center Race Accelerates

Crusoe, the Denver‑based AI data center company that began its life burning flare gas to mine cryptocurrency and remade itself into one of the most prominent names in AI infrastructure, is in talks to raise approximately $3 billion in a new funding round. Investors in the discussions expect the round to value the company in the $30 billion range, which would triple the valuation Crusoe carried just nine months ago when it closed its $1.375 billion Series E at more than $10 billion.

The talks were reported by Bloomberg on July 2, 2026. A final valuation has not been set and negotiations remain active, though the investor expectation of a $30 billion mark has been described by people familiar with the situation as the range the deal is expected to land in. If the round closes near that figure, it would make Crusoe one of the most valuable private AI infrastructure companies in the United States and reset the valuation benchmark for the neocloud category at large.

How Crusoe Got Here From There

The company's founding story sits at an unusual intersection of climate concern and commercial opportunism. Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness launched Crusoe in 2018 with the idea of capturing natural gas that oil producers were burning off as waste, known as flare gas, and using it to generate electricity for mobile data centers. The initial product was Bitcoin mining, which gave the company a relatively steady commercial model while it developed the infrastructure and operational knowledge it would later redirect toward AI.

Crusoe raised its way through the capital markets at a steady pace through the early years, including a $128 million Series B in 2021 led by Valor Equity Partners, a $350 million Series C in 2022 at a $1.75 billion valuation led by G2 Venture Partners, and a $600 million Series D in December 2024 led by Founders Fund. In March 2025, the company made a clean break with its cryptocurrency origins by selling its entire Digital Flare Mitigation and Bitcoin mining division to NYDIG, a New York‑based digital asset firm. The sale included all flare gas operations, 135 employees, and the renewable‑powered Bitcoin sites Crusoe had built over its first six years. From that point forward the company has operated as a fully committed AI infrastructure business with no cryptocurrency revenue exposure.

The October 2025 Series E raised $1.375 billion at a post‑money valuation above $10 billion, co‑led by Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Capital, the Abu Dhabi sovereign‑backed investment firm. A further $300 million in conventional debt financing closed in February 2026, bringing total capital raised to roughly $2.77 billion before the current raise enters the picture.

What Crusoe Actually Operates

The company builds and operates data centers optimized for AI workloads, running its own cloud platform called Crusoe Cloud alongside the physical infrastructure. Its approach to energy costs is the core commercial thesis: by identifying underutilized or stranded energy sources and co‑locating data centers directly at those sites, Crusoe targets energy expenses 30 to 50 percent below those carried by traditional hyperscalers. Since energy represents approximately 60 percent of the operating cost of an AI data center, that structural advantage translates directly into pricing power with customers who are watching their inference and training costs compound each quarter.

Crusoe is an NVIDIA Preferred Partner, appeared on both the Forbes AI 50 and TIME100AI lists, and has cloud customers including Cursor, Decart, Fireworks, Odyssey, and Together AI. The company has 1,457 employees as of May 2026, up substantially from the headcount it carried after selling its crypto division, and maintains 24/7 support with a sub‑six‑minute average response time and a 99.5 percent SLA guarantee that it has backed with a 100 percent customer satisfaction score as of its most recent reporting period.

Its power pipeline as of June 2026 covers 4.9 gigawatts of contracted capacity with a total project pipeline exceeding 40 gigawatts. That pipeline figure is what investors are pricing when they discuss a $30 billion valuation, because the contracted 4.9 gigawatts is only the first layer of what Crusoe believes it can deliver if it secures the capital to move faster on the broader pipeline.

The Stargate Saga and What It Revealed

The most high‑profile project Crusoe has been associated with is the Stargate initiative, the $500 billion public‑private AI infrastructure programme announced at the White House in January 2025 with backing from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. Crusoe developed and operates the flagship Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, a 1,000‑acre site designed for 1.2 gigawatts of capacity running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 Blackwell GPUs now operational across the first two buildings.

The Abilene project has not been without turbulence. In early 2026, a winter weather event in West Texas disrupted the liquid cooling infrastructure across multiple buildings, taking them offline for several days and straining the relationship between Oracle and Crusoe, though both companies maintained publicly that the partnership remained solid. More consequentially, Oracle and OpenAI in March 2026 abandoned plans to expand the campus beyond its committed 1.2 gigawatt build after financing negotiations collapsed alongside OpenAI's shifting and frequently revised capacity forecasts.

With the expansion space unoccupied, Crusoe found itself holding capacity that needed a new anchor tenant. Nvidia stepped in with a $150 million deposit to Crusoe to secure the site, motivated in part by the desire to ensure the facility would continue to be filled with Nvidia hardware rather than chips from rival AMD. Nvidia then helped broker conversations between Crusoe and Meta, which has been spending aggressively on AI infrastructure and projecting capital expenditure as high as $135 billion in 2026 alone. Negotiations between Meta and Crusoe over the Abilene expansion remain active.

Separately, Crusoe has announced a 900 megawatt campus in Abilene to support Microsoft AI infrastructure, a 1.8 gigawatt campus in Wyoming, and a partnership with Form Energy for 12 gigawatt‑hours of iron‑air battery storage to back its data center operations. In March 2026, the company signed a roughly 750 megawatt US power agreement with Bergen Engines to further support its pipeline.

Financial Performance and the IPO Signal

Crusoe projected revenue of approximately $998 million for 2025, representing a 262 percent increase over the $276 million it generated in 2024. The company has described a path to $2 billion in revenue by 2026, driven by its Stargate involvement, its Microsoft campus, and continued growth in its Crusoe Cloud platform, where bookings grew five times in the first three quarters of 2025 compared to the same period in the prior year.

In August 2025, Crusoe acquired Atero, an Israeli GPU orchestration startup, for $150 million. The deal established an R&D hub in Tel Aviv and gave Crusoe technology for GPU management and memory optimization that it is using to enhance its managed AI services.

The appointment of Michael Gordon as COO and CFO has drawn attention for a specific reason: Gordon previously served as CFO of MongoDB and led its 2017 initial public offering. Companies preparing for a public market transition frequently hire CFOs with IPO experience in advance of the process, and Gordon's appointment is widely read as a signal that Crusoe is at least positioning itself for that option, even if the timing has not been determined.

Why the Valuation Makes Sense and Where the Risk Is

A tripling of valuation in under a year on the back of a $3 billion raise is an extraordinary mark, but it reflects the structural realities of the AI infrastructure market more than speculative enthusiasm alone. Hyperscalers are constrained in how fast they can build, and the demand for compute capacity from model labs, cloud customers, and enterprise AI deployments has consistently outrun what traditional providers can supply. Private AI data center operators that can secure power, land, and GPU supply at gigawatt scale are sitting on a category of asset that commands a significant premium in the current market.

The honest risk in that picture is concentration. Crusoe's contracted capacity is anchored to a relatively small number of major tenants, and the Stargate episode demonstrated that even blue‑chip relationships built around publicly announced national infrastructure initiatives can face unexpected complications when financing negotiations stall and anchor clients change their minds about capacity needs. A company with 40 gigawatts of pipeline and 4.9 gigawatts of contracted capacity is a very different business from one where all of that pipeline has converted into signed offtake agreements, and that gap is the most important variable to watch as the proposed $3 billion round moves toward a close.

If it closes at the expected valuation, Crusoe's mark becomes the new reference point for the neocloud category and raises the competitive temperature for every other AI infrastructure company still in the middle of its own capital raise.