Crusoe Series F: Inside the $30.9B AI Data Center Company

Crusoe's Series F put a $30.9 billion post-money valuation on a company that started in 2018 turning otherwise-flared oilfield gas into power for bitcoin mining. Eight years later it builds gigawatt-scale AI campuses, manufactures its own electrical gear, and runs a GPU cloud on top, with more than $140 billion of total contracted value by its own count.

For the early-September reports on the round and the Jane Street contract, see Crusoe's $3B raise at a $30B valuation; for the quant firm's wider neocloud bet, see Jane Street's AI infrastructure investments. Round data lives on the Crusoe company page.

Crusoe Series F: Company Snapshot

Crusoe's Series F is an anticipated $3.9 billion round whose initial closing, announced September 17, 2026, carries a $30.9 billion post-money valuation. Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners co-led it, with Founders Fund, GIC, NVIDIA, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG also backing it, according to Crusoe's announcement.

What Crusoe Actually Does

Crusoe calls itself “the AI factory company,” and its September 2026 board announcement spells it out: it “sources power, develops data centers, manufactures critical components in-house, and delivers AI cloud services.”

The energy-first habit predates AI. Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness founded Crusoe in 2018 to run modular data centers at oil wells on gas that producers would otherwise flare, using the power to mine bitcoin. Bain Capital Ventures, which co-led the seed with Founders Fund, described it in a July 2018 memo as “a mobile data center operator that has semi proprietary access to free electricity at remote shale drilling sites,” according to BCV's history of the investment.

When Crusoe agreed in March 2025 to sell that bitcoin unit to NYDIG, the deal covered more than 425 modular data centers across seven U.S. states and parts of Argentina, roughly 1% of the world's bitcoin mining according to Crusoe, as CNBC reported. The method survived the sale. As the Series F release puts it: “Conventional data center developers treat power as a constraint to navigate after site selection. Crusoe starts there instead.”

How Crusoe Makes Money

Crusoe has three revenue streams, as TechCrunch laid them out: leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling inference. Its customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, and its Abilene, Texas site is used by OpenAI.

Stream one is campuses: Crusoe's June 2026 update counted five AI data center campuses contracted to hyperscale clients. The other two run through Crusoe Cloud, whose named customers skew toward AI labs and startups, including Cognition, Figure, Perplexity, Cursor and Together AI.

Three 2026 deals show where the cloud is heading. Bloomberg reported a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract with quant trading firm Jane Street, as TechCrunch relayed on September 3. On September 15, Crusoe announced a multi-year Perplexity partnership covering model training on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 clusters and production inference. On September 23 it signed a $65 million annual agreement with Thinking Machines Lab to serve the lab's open models on dedicated NVIDIA HGX B200 systems.

Funding History

Crusoe's equity rounds have grown more than 100-fold, from a $30 million Series A in December 2019 to the anticipated $3.9 billion Series F. Crunchbase News put total funding at nearly $7.2 billion in early September 2026, counting the Series F at $3 billion, in its weekly megadeals roundup.

Sources: Bain Capital Ventures (seed), PR Newswire (Series A), and Crusoe newsroom releases for the Series B, Series C, Series D, Series E and Series F.

All three Series F co-leads are repeat backers. Mubadala Capital's Ibrahim Ajami said the firm has “partnered with Crusoe since 2022, invested in every round since.” Valor Equity Partners led the 2021 Series B, and Atreides Management appears in the Series C and Series E investor lists. Founders Fund is named in every round from the seed through the Series F. The Series F release also lists 30 additional investors, among them ARK Invest, Baillie Gifford and Fidelity.

Debt fills out the stack: a $225 million Upper90 credit facility in early 2025 and $750 million from Brookfield's infrastructure debt platform in June 2025, per the Brookfield announcement. ION Analytics, citing one source, also reported in December 2025 an ongoing employee share sale of around $120 million that, as The Information first reported, would value Crusoe at $13 billion.

What the headline misses

The $3.9 billion is a target: Crusoe's release describes the “initial closing of its anticipated” round, and the figure moved while it was being reported. On September 3, TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, described a $3 billion round at a $30 billion valuation; two weeks later the official numbers were $3.9 billion and $30.9 billion. And NVIDIA sits in the Series D, E and F investor lists while making four of the six GPU models on Crusoe Cloud's GPU menu, a dual role worth underwriting separately.

Product Portfolio

Crusoe's portfolio has four parts.

Manufacturing is the least glamorous piece and arguably the most strategic: Crusoe has hired more than 300 craft workers across two Tulsa sites and supplied more than 2,500 switchboards to Abilene, per its Tulsa announcement, which keeps it out of the supplier queue for long-lead gear.

Abilene, Stargate and the Energy-First Build-Out

Abilene made Crusoe. In January 2024, Lochmiller heard about a request for proposals for a 100 megawatt data center that most bidders quoted at two and a half years; he turned to a Lancium substation in Abilene, Texas approved to scale to one gigawatt, then brought in Oracle as the customer, BCV recounts. Construction began in June 2024, two buildings were energized within a year, and Oracle began delivering NVIDIA GB200 racks in June 2025, per Crusoe's September 2025 release, which calls it “Stargate's flagship data center campus” (see our Stargate explainer).

The eight-building, 1.2 gigawatt campus is financed through a $15 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital and Primary Digital Infrastructure. By June 2026, two buildings were operational, six were under construction, and Crusoe had broken ground on a second, 900 megawatt Abilene campus for Microsoft, per its June 9 capacity update.

Not every plan has held. In March 2026, Oracle and OpenAI abandoned a planned 600 megawatt expansion near the Abilene site, and Meta then considered leasing the expansion site from Crusoe, with NVIDIA helping facilitate the talks, Bloomberg reported, as Reuters summarized. In Wyoming, Crusoe left Project Jade, announced as a 1.8 gigawatt campus near Cheyenne (Cowboy State Daily now puts it at 2.7 gigawatts) that it had been developing with Tallgrass, months before the exit became public in June 2026, according to both Cowboy State Daily and Cap City News. Crusoe had told Bloomberg its data center client asked it to pause construction, Cowboy State Daily reported. The project continues without Crusoe.

The power mix keeps shifting too. On September 25, 2026, TechCrunch reported that Crusoe had ended a $1.25 billion agreement for 29 of Boom Supersonic's 42-megawatt Superpower turbines, with deliveries once slated for 2027. A Crusoe spokesperson said its energy plans “haven't changed” and that it still plans to use turbines, “just not Boom's.” The original Abilene campus runs on grid power with gas turbines for backup only, the report notes, while the Microsoft campus will run on on-site gas turbines.

Meanwhile it announced a 1.0 gigawatt campus in Childress, Texas with Lancium on July 15, 2026. One read: Crusoe treats each site's power as a portfolio decision, so today's plan is no guarantee of next year's.

Revenue and Key Metrics

Crusoe does not publish revenue, and the public estimates are thin: research firm Sacra estimates 2024 revenue of $276 million, up 82%, and a source cited by ION Analytics in December 2025 expected about $500 million for that year.

What Crusoe does disclose is momentum: cloud bookings grew 5x in 2025's first three quarters, per the Series E release, Managed Inference passed $100 million in contracted ARR within a year of launch, and contracted capacity rose from 4.9 gigawatts in June to more than 6 gigawatts by mid-September.

The number that matters most is contracted versus delivered. About 1 gigawatt is operational, so my read is that most of the $140 billion-plus in contracted value depends on building roughly five more gigawatts on schedule, and reported revenue will likely lag the contract headline for years.

Competitive Landscape

Crusoe gets grouped with the neoclouds: CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Fluidstack and Nscale. Two share its crypto roots: CoreWeave, as BCV notes, was also a former crypto mining operation, and Nscale was spun out of Australian cryptocurrency mining company Arkon Energy. Crusoe's distinguishing claim is keeping power, construction, manufacturing and cloud in-house.

Definitions differ (contracted value, revenue backlog, filed contracts), so the top row is directional. Lambda's mark is from November 2025.

CoreWeave is the public benchmark: second-quarter 2026 revenue of $2.6 billion, up 112% year over year, according to CNBC, while Nebius reported second-quarter revenue of $582 million, up 454%, with its AI cloud business up 514% to $574.9 million, per its SEC filing the same week (see CoreWeave vs Nebius).

Lambda raised $1 billion of short-dated debt in August 2026 to buy NVIDIA chips it will lease to Microsoft, Bloomberg reported, and is reportedly in talks for a $3 billion pre-IPO round, per TechCrunch. Jane Street led Fluidstack's early-September round. Nscale filed IPO paperwork and secured $3.36 billion in convertible financing led by Third Point, as TechCrunch reported(our Nscale IPO breakdown).

Leadership Team

Bull Case / Bear Case

IPO Outlook

In December 2025, ION Analytics reported that Crusoe was discussing a listing as soon as 2026 but had not appointed a syndicate; Lochmiller called public markets an “interesting way” to capitalize the business without committing to a timeline. On August 17, 2026, Axios Pro reported talks with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, short of a formal bank selection and with no target date, size or valuation disclosed, per Blockspace's summary of the report.

The hiring points the same way: a CFO who has taken a company public, and a sitting public-company CFO chairing the audit committee. That is inference; Crusoe has announced no IPO, and the Series F release does not mention one.

The Bottom Line

The Series F prices Crusoe's vertical integration as a premium. Investors are betting that controlling power, construction and equipment lets Crusoe turn contracts into energized capacity faster than peers. The risks showed up in 2026 itself: tenants changing plans, power strategies rewritten mid-build, and no audited revenue. Watch delivered gigawatts against contracted gigawatts; that ratio will say more about whether $30.9 billion was cheap than any funding headline.

Figures are from Crusoe releases, media reports and named research estimates as of September 27, 2026. Crusoe is private; revenue figures here are third-party estimates.