Crusoe Energy has closed its Series D funding round with $600 million.

The round valued Crusoe at $2.8 billion, less than the $3 billion the company was rumored to be aiming for.

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– Crusoe Energy

The investment was led by venture capital firm Founders Fund, and others including Fidelity, Long Journey Ventures, the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Nvidia, Ribbit Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, reports Reuters.

The funding will be used to invest in expanding Crusoe's data center footprint.

Crusoe has also made its "Crusoe Cloud" offering generally available, designed for AI and machine learning workloads.

“We believe a new approach is needed to power the AI revolution,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO and co-founder of Crusoe. “To reduce complexity, accelerate time-to-value, and support the most demanding AI solutions, customers need a vertically integrated approach.

"We are able to innovate faster and bring new, state-of-the-art capacity online in a fraction of the time compared to legacy cloud providers while delivering unmatched results for customers, making the promises of AI a reality.”

Plans for the funding round were first shared in October 2024, with the company at the time seeking to raise $500 million, valuing the company at $3 billion.

By the end of November, Crusoe had expanded this with the goal of raising almost $818 million, noting that it had already secured $686 million. It is unclear why the funding round has closed at the lower $600 million, nor what caused the company's valuation to dip to $2.8 billion.

Update - DCD has been informed that the previously reported numbers were not confirmed by the company.

The lead investor of Crusoe - Founders Fund - was launched by Peter Thiel, also founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, a company previously accused by whistle blower Edward Snowden of playing a role in creating the US government's international spy program, PRISM. Palantir denies any connection.

Earlier this year, Palantir agreed to a 'strategic partnership' with the Israel Defense Ministry to supply technology to support the war in Gaza. As of December, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza is nearing 45,000.

Crusoe launched in 2018 as a cryptomining business that deployed containerized data centers to oil wells to harness natural gas that would otherwise be "flared off" and wasted.

It then expanded to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), and last year, it signed a deal to locate a number of GPUs in atNorth's ICE02 data center in Iceland.

In October, Crusoe entered into a $3.4 billion joint venture with asset manager Blue Owl Capital to build a huge data center in Abilene, Texas.