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Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers It is said Which will be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is set to raise $818 million, according to a report. SEC filing.
The filing indicates that Crusoe received $686 million of the total $818 million he hopes to raise. Seventy investors have contributed to the tranche so far, according to the filing.
“The company in our growth stage is always talking to investors,” a Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Financial Times I mentioned Earlier this year, Crusoe was in talks to raise nearly $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Phyllis Ventures. Investors appear to have had an appetite for a larger tranche, which would presumably come with a valuation higher than the rumored $3 billion – which was already double Crusoe’s previous valuation.
If Crusoe succeeds in raising $818 million, it would bring the startup’s total to about $1.5 billion in equity and debt. Late last year, Crusoe took out $200 million in debt by using his data center chips as collateral to buy thousands of AI processors.
Crusoe launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency company, fueling its data centers with natural gas that would otherwise be “flared” and wasted. Like many cryptocurrency mining operations, Crusoe pivoted as AI rose to prominence, striking deals with AI companies to provide high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.
In early October, Crusoe announced that he would enter into a $3.4 billion joint venture with asset management firm Blue All Capital to build a massive data center in Abilene, Texas. It is expected that the campus will be leased to Oracle, which in turn will lease it rent To Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI.
There is a thriving market for “neocloud” startups building low-cost, on-demand clouds for AI.
CoreWeave, a GPU infrastructure provider, has raised more than $12 million across a series of deals in the last 18 months or so. Lambda Labs in early April secured a special purpose financing vehicle worth up to $500 million. The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by billionaire Jed McCaleb, announced last October that it was investing $500 million in GPU-powered data centers. Together AI, a GPU cloud host that also conducts generative AI research, in March raised $106 million in a round led by Salesforce.
The environmental impact of construction operations can be significant. IDC expected Electricity consumption in global data centers will more than double between 2023 and 2028 According to According to Morgan Stanley, data center technology suppliers will emit the equivalent of 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.
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