Crusoe

Crusoe (Crusoe Energy Systems LLC) describes itself as an "AI factory company" that designs, builds and operates the infrastructure used to train and serve AI models. Its business spans four layers: an energy-first sourcing approach across wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, natural gas and carbon capture; modular, scalable AI data center construction; the Crusoe Cloud infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offering; and managed AI services delivered through Crusoe Intelligence Foundry. Bloomberg's profile characterizes the company as developing AI infrastructure and clean computing solutions, manufacturing modular data center components and power distribution systems, and operating AI-optimized data centers and cloud infrastructure for enterprises in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Crusoe Cloud offers NVIDIA and AMD accelerators (NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and HGX B200; AMD MI355x and MI300x), accelerated storage and RDMA networking, alongside managed Kubernetes, managed Slurm and fault-tolerant AutoClusters. The company markets 99.5% uptime on its website, while its Series E release cites 99.98% uptime and enterprise-grade support. Crusoe Intelligence Foundry provides a hosted catalog of third-party open models plus serverless fine-tuning, serverless inference, self-serve deployments and tailored deployments; the company claims up to 9.9x faster time to first token and 5x higher throughput versus vLLM, and up to 20x faster model deployment with cost reductions up to 81%.

On the physical infrastructure side, Crusoe is the developer of the 1.2 GW Abilene, Texas campus built for OpenAI and Oracle as the first Stargate site, with the first phase live in September 2025, roughly one year after construction began. Additional projects include a 1.8 GW campus in Wyoming, a 1.0 GW campus with Lancium in Childress, Texas, a 900 MW campus in Abilene supporting Microsoft AI infrastructure, natural-gas-powered data centers in Alberta, Canada, and modular "Crusoe Spark" data centers deployed as Crusoe Edge Zones. Cloud regions span the US and Europe (us-northcentral1-a, us-east1-a, us-southcentral1-a, eu-iceland1-a), with partnerships including Digital Realty, Equinix, atNorth and Polar.

Founding story

According to Contrary Research, Crusoe was founded in 2018 in Denver, Colorado by Chase Lochmiller (CEO) and Cully Cavness (COO). Lochmiller holds a bachelor's degree in math and physics from MIT (2008) and a master's in computer science from Stanford (2016) with a focus on artificial intelligence, and previously worked as a quantitative trader at Jump Trading before spending six months climbing five of the world's tallest summits. Cavness graduated from Middlebury College in 2010 with a bachelor's in geology, received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, worked at Recurrent Engineering on geothermal, solar thermal and industrial waste heat projects from 2010 to 2013, and was an energy investment banking associate from 2015 to 2016. The two high school classmates decided on a 2017 hiking trip to build a company that would tap stranded energy sources to power computing, naming it after Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Their initial focus was reducing oilfield gas flaring, a practice that accounts for nearly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions and wastes over 150 billion cubic metres of gas per year as of 2024.

Business model

Crusoe monetizes a vertically integrated stack: it sources and activates power, designs and constructs AI-optimized data center campuses (including through joint ventures and long-term capacity agreements with hyperscalers and AI labs), and sells cloud compute, storage and networking plus managed AI services through Crusoe Cloud and Crusoe Intelligence Foundry. It also manufactures modular data center components and power distribution systems.

Revenue derives from AI cloud consumption (GPU compute, storage, networking, managed Kubernetes/Slurm, serverless inference and fine-tuning with free trial credits and self-serve as well as enterprise-contracted deployments) and from contracted AI data center capacity supplied to large customers such as Meta, Oracle/OpenAI and Microsoft. Crusoe reported Crusoe Cloud bookings growing 5x in the first three quarters of 2025 versus the prior year.

Traction

Crusoe's power pipeline grew over 4x to more than 45 GW as of the October 2025 Series E announcement, with total development pipeline reported above 40 GW in mid-2026 and contracted AI infrastructure capacity of 4.9 GW across data centers and Crusoe Cloud announced in June 2026. Crusoe Cloud bookings grew 5x in the first three quarters of 2025 year over year. The first phase of the 1.2 GW Abilene campus went live in September 2025, one year after construction started. Contrary Research lists 836 employees.

Latest developments

During 2026 the company announced a manufacturing facility for modular AI factories, Crusoe Edge Zones, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certifications, a Command Center operations platform, serverless fine-tuning and self-serve inference deployments, an expanded NVIDIA collaboration, a 900 MW Abilene campus supporting Microsoft AI infrastructure, a 1.0 GW Childress campus with Lancium, a ~750 MW power agreement with Bergen Engines, a 5 GW AI UPS deployment with ON.energy, a 12 GWh iron-air battery agreement with Form Energy, and a nuclear-powered AI factory partnership with Aalo Atomics. In July 2026, Bloomberg reported the company was in talks for roughly $3 billion in new funding at a valuation around $30 billion, with terms not finalized.