CRUSOE

Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness founded Crusoe in 2018. They were old friends who used to climb mountains together.

Lochmiller came from crypto and hedge funds and had worked at Polychain Capital. Cavness came from the energy world.

Their idea sounded strange at first. Oil drilling produces natural gas as a byproduct.

Out in remote fields there is no pipeline to sell it, so companies just burn it off into the sky. That is called flaring.

It wastes energy and dumps carbon for nothing. Crusoe built modular data centers that sit right next to the well and run on that otherwise-wasted gas.

Early on the computers mined bitcoin. That was the wedge.

The real prize came later.

Crusoe sells computing power. In the early days it captured wasted natural gas at oil sites and used it to run bitcoin mining rigs.

Then AI happened. Companies training and running large models need enormous amounts of GPU computing, and they cannot get enough of it.

Crusoe pivoted hard. Today it builds and operates giant data centers packed with Nvidia chips and rents that capacity to AI companies.

Customers pay for access to the GPUs. Crusoe handles the power, the cooling, and the buildout.

In 2025 it sold off the original bitcoin mining business to go all-in on AI cloud.

The core product is Crusoe Cloud. It is GPU computing rented out to AI companies for training and running models.

Crusoe also builds and operates the physical data centers themselves, including the flagship Abilene, Texas campus. Its older product was Digital Flare Mitigation, the mobile units that turned wasted gas into power for computing.

The company designs the modular data-center hardware, manages the energy sourcing, and runs the whole stack end to end.

The big break was timing. Crusoe spent years learning how to build fast, cheap, modular data centers in the middle of nowhere.

Then the AI boom hit and the whole world suddenly wanted exactly that skill. The company landed the anchor tenant every infrastructure player dreams of.

It is building a massive campus in Abilene, Texas, that serves as a home for OpenAI's Stargate project alongside Oracle. That single project reportedly runs into the billions.

Crusoe went from a clever climate story to core plumbing for the AI industry.

Building data centers this fast eats cash. Crusoe has raised over $1.5 billion in equity and lined up billions more in debt and project financing.

That is a lot of borrowed money riding on the AI boom continuing. If demand for GPUs cools, or if a customer the size of OpenAI changes plans, the bills do not stop.

Crusoe also fights deep-pocketed rivals like CoreWeave and the big cloud giants. It is a capital-hungry business where the winners need cheap power and cheaper money.

Crusoe is betting it can supply both.

Founders Fund led Crusoe's $600 million Series D in December 2024, valuing the company around $2.8 billion. Peter Thiel's firm putting its name on the round told the market Crusoe was a serious AI infrastructure bet, not a crypto side project.

Earlier backers include Valor Equity Partners, which led the Series B, and G2 Venture Partners, which led the Series C. Nvidia has also backed the company, which matters a lot when the whole business depends on getting Nvidia chips.

The investor list reads like a who's who of people betting the AI buildout has a long way to run.