Crusoe Energy plans to raise approximately $500 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the Financial Times reports.
Founders Fund previously invested in the business, and would be joined by fellow former investor Felicis Ventures. The round would value the company at around $3bn, nearly double what it was worth two years ago.
Earlier this month, Crusoe announced that it would enter into a $3.4bn joint venture with asset manager Blue Owl Capital to build a gigantic data center campus in Abilene, Texas.
That cluster is expected to be leased to Oracle, which in turn will lease it to Microsoft, who will rent it to OpenAI - a deal believed to come out of OpenAI's desire to move faster than Microsoft can keep up.
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 signed a deal to locate a number of GPUs in atNorth's ICE02 data center in Iceland.
Since the generative AI explosion, it has joined fellow cryptominers in pivoting to GPU AI clouds. Competitors include CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Northern Data, Hut 8, Earth Wind and Power, and Applied Digital.
Founders Fund, an early investor in OpenAI and DeepMind, has also backed Edge data center company Armada.
Crusoe AI cloud expands partnership with storage provider Lightbits Labs
In other news, Crusoe Energy Systems is expanding its use of Lightbits Labs' storage offerings with Crusoe's AI Cloud.
Lightbits, inventor of the NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) over TCP (transmission control protocol) storage, will offer its block storage solutions to customers via the Crusoe AI cloud.
The storage offering enables direct access to NVMe storage over standard Ethernet TCP/IP networks. This reduces latency and increases throughput, making it ideal for artificial intelligence and machine workloads.
“Lightbits’ comprehensive suite of enterprise-grade functionality has been instrumental in helping us build a high-performance, climate-aligned AI cloud platform, addressing performance and operational gaps that other block storage solutions struggle with,” said Patrick McGregor, Crusoe’s chief product officer.
“From data preprocessing to real-time inference, the advantages of lower and more consistent latency, higher throughput, and linear scalability make Lightbits high-performance block storage an excellent offering for Crusoe Cloud’s customers to optimize their AI workflows. The Lightbits team continues to be a great partner, providing continual improvements in product usability and high-quality, hands-on support for our team.”
Lightbits claims that its storage offering delivers up to 4x higher performance compared to other vendors and open-source solutions, and can scale IOPS with increased load while maintaining latencies under 500 microseconds.
“Our collaboration with Crusoe has reached new heights, underscoring Lightbits’ commitment to providing cloud infrastructure optimized for AI workloads,” said Kam Eshghi, Lightbits’ co-founder and CSO. “The expanded partnership reflects the tangible results Crusoe has seen and demonstrates our crucial role in shaping the future of AI cloud technology.”
Crusoe has been using Lightbits' storage solutions since the launch of its cloud. In 2023, the company released a blog post detailing how it had built the block storage for AI.
Earlier this month, Crusoe announced it was collaborating with Vast Data to offer high-performance storage for AI to its cloud customers.
