Data center developer Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in a Series F funding round, increasing its valuation to $30.9 billion. The investment was co-led by firms such as Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with additional support from investors like Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG. The company also announced the addition of three new board members: Thomas Seifert, CFO of Cloudflare; Bill Stein from Primary Digital Infrastructure; and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and a member of Tesla’s board. Straubel had previously invested in Crusoe in 2021, and Crusoe became one of the first customers of Redwood’s energy storage solutions. Crusoe was founded in 2018 as a cryptocurrency mining company that used excess natural gas, known as flared gas, to power its operations. However, as demand for computing power grew, especially for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, the company shifted its focus to providing AI infrastructure. This pivot allowed Crusoe to tap into the booming market for high-performance computing, which is essential for training and running AI models. The new funding will be used to support existing data center projects, including a large facility in Abilene, Texas, which is used by OpenAI, and smaller, modular AI data centers called Spark. These modular units can be transported by truck and connected to power sources in various locations, allowing for rapid deployment without the need for large-scale construction. This approach may also help Crusoe avoid opposition from local communities that often protest the environmental and aesthetic impacts of large data center complexes. Crusoe's business model includes leasing data center space to customers who provide their own graphics processing units (GPUs), renting out its own GPUs, and selling computing power used to run AI models, known as inference. Recently, the company signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract with quantitative trading firm Jane Street, according to Bloomberg. Crusoe has also begun discussions with investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about the possibility of an initial public offering (IPO) in the near future. This latest funding follows a $1.38 billion raise in October 2023 at a $10 billion valuation. Major customers of Crusoe include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.