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Data center startup Crusoe Energy is raising as much as $500 million in equity from investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund to expand its facilities that provide the infrastructure for the AI ​​boom.
The fundraising will make Crusoe value about $3 billion, greater than double its value two years ago, in response to three people conversant in the deal. It is the newest young company to see its fortunes skyrocket resulting from significant spending on AI following the discharge of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Founders Fund, which has invested in Crusoe since its seed round in 2019 and was also an early backer of OpenAI, will lead the brand new round of funding, in response to three people near the deal discussions. Felicis Ventures, one other existing Crusoe investor, can even participate, the people said.
Crusoe is considered one of a fast-growing group of startups in an emerging industry of “neoclouds” — data center firms that provide outsourced cloud computing to other tech firms to construct AI.
The industry has received enormous financial support from investors in Silicon Valley and Wall Street to finance the acquisition of tens of 1000’s of powerful AI chips from Nvidia – so-called graphics processors. These could be placed in data centers and rented to technology firms resembling Microsoft and Meta. CoreWeave, the biggest neocloud company, has raised greater than $12 billion in debt and equity in a series of deals over the past 18 months.
Crusoe's investment round comes because it announced it had signed a $3.4 billion take care of Blue Owl Capital, an alternate asset manager, earlier this month to finance the development of a brand new data center in Texas. The facility is leased to Oracle, which has a contract to supply computing power to Microsoft and OpenAI.
Venture capital firms have rushed to take a position in a technology that many imagine can be as vital because the Internet or mobile technology. According to personal market data firm PitchBook, greater than 40 percent of the $93 billion spent by VCs in the primary half of this 12 months went to AI startups.
The popularity of supporting cutting-edge AI models resembling OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI and Anthropic has rapidly driven up their valuations, with OpenAI priced at $150 billion earlier this month. Many enterprise funds are as an alternative considering investing within the infrastructure to support AI or applications that use it, within the hope of finding cheaper deals.
Crusoe was founded in 2018 by quantitative trader Chase Lochmiller and energy investment banker Cully Cavness to create data center modules that may collect exhaust gases from oil fields and use them for energy-intensive computing resembling Bitcoin mining and AI. The company shifted its focus around 2020 to creating more everlasting data center facilities, purchasing large quantities of AI chips from Nvidia and leasing its cloud computing technology to firms developing AI models.
Late last 12 months, Crusoe took on $200 million in debt and used his chips as collateral with New York investment firm Upper90. The capital was used to buy 1000’s more H100 GPUs from Nvidia.
Crusoe, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures declined to comment.
