Crusoe Puts $3.9 Billion Behind Truckable AI Factories

Crusoe closed a $3.9 billion Series F on September 17 that values the AI data-center builder at $30.9 billion. Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners co-led the oversubscribed round, with Founders Fund, GIC, NVIDIA, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG in the syndicate.

The Denver company is using the cash on two very different products. One is the familiar gigawatt campus. The other is Spark, a factory-built box that can be hauled to spare power and switched on without another year of local construction politics.

Crusoe Closes a $3.9 Billion Round at $30.9 Billion

Crusoe called the raise the initial closing of a $3.9 billion Series F and put the post-money mark at $30.9 billion. That is roughly triple the $10 billion valuation attached to its Series E last October, when it raised $1.38 billion. Additional names in the new round include Salesforce Ventures, Robinhood Ventures Fund I, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Tiger Global, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates.

Co-founder and chief executive Chase Lochmiller framed the cheque as a bid to own the stack, not only to rent halls for other people’s chips.

We believe AI will usher in an era of abundance: new scientific breakthroughs, unprecedented economic growth, and human prosperity. Getting there means controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and we’re grateful to have investors who share that conviction.

Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO, Crusoe Series F statement

The company posted the same close on its own account, pairing the round with a short film of campuses and Spark units.

Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in Series F, co-led by @Atreidesmgmt, @MubadalaCapital, and @valor Equity Partners.

This capital will help us grow across our AI factories, from large-scale campuses to modular Crusoe Spark units, and continue to innovate with Crusoe Cloud.

The… pic.twitter.com/oSBeyVfCQj

— Crusoe (@CrusoeAI) September 17, 2026

THE SERIES F AT A GLANCE

Five gigawatts of that contracted load still has to be built and powered. The round is equity for a company that already sells three ways: it leases halls to customers who bring their own GPUs, it rents its own chips, and it sells inference. A five-year Crusoe Cloud contract with Jane Street Group, described in market accounts of the private deal as worth about $13 billion, is the largest named offtake around the raise. Crusoe has also talked with bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about a possible IPO.

A Data Center That Leaves on a Flatbed

Spark is Crusoe’s answer to the slow part of the AI build. GPUs can be assembled on a known cycle. A permitted, cooled, networked hall cannot. Co-founder Cully Cavness, Crusoe’s president and chief strategy officer, said speed is why the company stood up a dedicated Spark plant, moving past ordinary job-site construction into a manufactured product.

The Brighton, Colorado factory is 352,000 square feet. Crusoe put more than $200 million against that plant and an initial Spark fleet, and said the first factory-built modules were due in the third quarter of 2026. Units already run at Redwood Materials’ campus in Sparks, Nevada, on a solar field and second-life EV batteries. Cavness listed low-latency inference, on-premise jobs, sovereign deployments, and grouped training clusters as the uses that do not need a Texas mega-campus.

SPARK IN PLAIN TERMS

• The box: A prefabricated modular AI factory that packs power, cooling, remote monitoring, fire suppression, and high-density racks into one deployable unit.
• The range: Crusoe says a deployment can start in the hundreds of kilowatts and scale to tens or hundreds of megawatts by grouping modules.
• The clock: Treating the hall as a manufactured product, Crusoe says it can deliver those data centers in as little as three months.
• The plug: Spark is designed to sit on solar plus used EV batteries, grid power, gas generation, or small modular reactors.
• The cooling: Air-cooled units are shipping first; a liquid-cooled version for denser GPU clusters is planned for the second half of 2026.

Product write-ups also describe a container-size enclosure with GPUs, storage, and cooling, plus satellite links for sites with no terrestrial network. Crusoe launched Edge Zones alongside the Brighton plant, a cloud SKU for low-latency and sovereign capacity in chosen geographies. The political pitch is quieter than the engineering one: a cluster of boxes next to an idle substation is a smaller target than an 1,100-acre campus.

Why Abilene Is Fighting the Power Plant

The flagship that made Crusoe famous is still the other product. Crusoe designed and built the 1.2 gigawatt Abilene, Texas campus that supports Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and it says OpenAI trained Astra, which it calls its first artificial general intelligence, there. Independent trackers at Epoch AI list the Stargate Abilene site as already live, with an estimated 421 megawatts of IT power now and a modeled rise to about 843 megawatts later in 2026. Those IT-load estimates sit under Crusoe’s 1.2 gigawatt campus figure; they are not a second size for the same plant.

The fight in Taylor County is not about the halls. It is about the gas plant that feeds them. On August 5, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told Crusoe Energy Systems that expedited permits for an expanded generating station at the Stargate site had preliminary approval. Oil & Gas Watch, reading Crusoe’s filing, said the Longhorn Data Center Power Plant would go from 10 gas turbines to 49. The group puts extra greenhouse gases at more than 6.7 million tons a year and other air pollutants above 1,600 tons a year, and it counts 11,862 people within three miles of the plant.

THE ABILENE PERMIT CLOCK

1. November 7, 2025: TCEQ receives Crusoe’s three air applications, numbered 182126, PSDTX1688, and GHGPSDTX263.
2. August 5, 2026: The agency notifies Crusoe, the city, and the county of preliminary approval on an expedited path.
3. August 9, 2026: Crusoe’s required legal notice runs, opening a 30-day comment window on carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, sulfur dioxide, greenhouse gases, ammonia, sulfuric acid mist, and hazardous air pollutants.
4. September 1, 2026: State Rep. Stan Lambert, R-Abilene, asks TCEQ for an in-person public meeting in Abilene before any final action.
5. September 10, 2026: TCEQ lifts the September 13 comment deadline. The window stays open until the meeting ends, and the agency must give 30 days’ notice once a date is set.

Lambert wrote that, given the size of the plant and the contaminants in the notice, residents should have a convenient way to ask questions and put comments on the record. TCEQ Executive Director Kelly Keel said public meetings are how people ask questions, give opinions, and comment formally. Ryan Vise, the agency’s director of external relations, said interest in Crusoe’s filing was already high and that air-quality permit files on the expansion remain open for comment. Crusoe did not offer a comment on the permit fight in local coverage of Lambert’s request.

That is the constraint Spark is built around. A 1.2 gigawatt campus can still win a DCD project award and train a frontier model. It also concentrates turbines, trucks, and a comment file on one set of neighbors. A module that plugs into power someone else already has does not erase emissions. It does move the argument off a single fence line.

Brighton and Tulsa Are Building the Boxes

The raise did not arrive ahead of the factories. It arrived just after them. On September 14, Crusoe opened a second Tulsa plant and added 400,000 square feet, taking its U.S. manufacturing footprint to about 1 million square feet. The Oklahoma shops make medium-voltage switchgear, low-voltage switchboards, electrical enclosures, industrial controls, and copper busbar. More than 300 local craft workers now staff the two Tulsa sites, up from the 100 the company expected when the first shop opened in 2024. Output already includes more than 2,500 switchboards sent to Abilene.

Governor Kevin Stitt and Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols attended the ribbon cutting. Three days later the Series F closed. Brighton is the Spark line; Tulsa is the electrical guts for campuses and modules alike. Crusoe also still signs large sites. With Lancium it announced a 1.0 gigawatt, 270-acre campus in Childress, Texas, in July. The company is not choosing small instead of big. It is paying to make the small path real so the big path is no longer the only one.

Power is the starting point, not a later headache. Crusoe says it originates generation in-house and partners across grid, battery, nuclear, thermal, and renewable suppliers. The Redwood tie is the cleanest picture of that idea. In June 2025 the two firms unveiled a Sparks microgrid that Crusoe called North America’s largest second-life battery deployment, rated at 12 megawatts and 63 megawatt-hours, feeding Spark units from a 20-acre solar array and about five acres of used packs. Spark’s spec sheet now lists small modular reactors beside that battery-and-solar pairing.

Cloud Bookings Are Running 20 Times Last Year

The factories matter because Crusoe Cloud is no longer a side door on a construction firm. Bookings are up more than 20 times year to date, per the company, and Managed Inference, launched in late 2025, is already above $100 million in annualized recurring revenue. Crusoe says its inference engine, using a memory layer it brands MemoryAlloy, can cut time-to-first-token by as much as 9.9 times and raise throughput five times versus vLLM. Gartner has it as a Magic Quadrant Visionary. Artificial Analysis ranked it first for inference speed. NVIDIA lists it as an Exemplar Cloud.

Named cloud customers on the Series F announcement include Cognition, Figure, and Perplexity, the last of those in a multi-year deal dated September 15. Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle sit on the wider customer list. The Jane Street contract, if it holds at the figure circulating around the private papers, is a finance house buying training and inference clusters the way a hyperscaler would. Inference is the workload Spark is sized for. Lochmiller has said you do not actually need an Abilene to serve models. The campus still trains them. The boxes are for everything that has to run closer to a user, a border, or a spare feeder.

Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer at Atreides Management, said the economics of AI flow to the lowest-cost producer of intelligence and that owning the chain is a structural edge. Ibrahim Ajami, who leads ventures at Mubadala Capital, said Mubadala has been in every round since 2022. Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners, an investor for almost six years, called Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness operators who had already delivered for sophisticated customers. Sovereign and chip-maker money is sitting in the same cap table: Mubadala, QIA, GIC, and NVIDIA. The bet those names are underwriting is not a single Texas site. It is a manufacturer that can drop compute on whatever electrons it can lock.

Straubel, Seifert, and a Board Built for Power

Crusoe added three directors with the round. Thomas Seifert is Cloudflare’s chief financial officer. Bill Stein, formerly chief executive of Digital Realty, is a partner and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure. JB Straubel is founder and chief executive of Redwood Materials and sits on Tesla’s board. Straubel invested personally in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy-storage line. The new seats read as finance, wholesale data-center real estate, and batteries, which matches a company trying to close the gap between a turbine permit and a truck that already has power on board.

Crusoe now counts more than 1,800 people across five countries, with new offices in Bellevue, Washington, and New York, and hiring in every market where it operates. It was founded in 2018 around flared natural gas and crypto mining, then turned the same stranded-power habit on GPUs. The Series F does not settle Abilene’s comment file, and it does not flip Spark from a Nevada prototype plus a Colorado line into a gigawatt of delivered modules. It does pay for both tracks at once, while 5 gigawatts of contracted load still sits on paper and a Texas public meeting has no date.

Lambert’s hearing, when TCEQ sets it, will be the next hard look at the campus model. Until then the new money is already in the plants that weld the switchboards and bolt the Spark boxes, which is the part of this round you can visit without a permit docket.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a private funding round, company statements, and public permit filings. It is for information only and is not investment advice, an offer of securities, or a recommendation to buy or sell Crusoe or any other company’s shares. Readers who are considering an investment in private or public technology companies should consult a licensed financial adviser or securities lawyer who can review the actual offering documents. Figures, valuations, contract values, and permit statuses are those published by the cited companies and agencies as of the dates in this piece and can change with later closings, filings, or hearings.