Data center company Crusoe Energy Systems LLC has reportedly raised $1.3 billion to acquire advanced hardware and support the rapid buildout of large-scale artificial intelligence data centers.
According to the Financial Times today, the funding was raised on a valuation of about $10 billion. Crusoe hasn’t yet announced the funding.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe started with a mission to capture wasted energy from oil-field flaring and repurpose it to power compute infrastructure. In its initial incarnation, Crusoe deployed modular, mobile data centers right at well sites, tapping the natural gas that would otherwise be burned off, turning that stranded energy into a fuel for high-intensity computing tasks.
Initially, Crusoe provided energy for bitcoin mining before later pivoting toward AI and high performance computing.
In 2025, Crusoe now describes itself as a vertically integrated “neocloud” operator, one that builds large purpose-built facilities, securing or harvesting low-cost power and offering graphics processing unit clusters and AI infrastructure to enterprises.
Crusoe generates revenue across multiple streams, including contracting with oil and gas producers to mitigate flaring and leasing compute infrastructure, including GPUs, to AI and tech firms. Notably, the company owns both the energy capture side via gas-to-compute and the compute delivery side via its cloud and data centers, allowing Crusoe to present a vertically integrated value chain.
By capturing methane or natural gas, both of which emit carbon dioxide and are otherwise wasted, oil producers sidestep flaring penalties, align with emissions goals and gain access to an energy partner; Crusoe monetizes compute and carbon mitigation.
The Series E round was reportedly led by Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners LP.
“We are seeing tremendous and accelerating demand for compute infrastructure, unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed in my career,” Crusoe Chief Executive Chase Lochmiller told FT. “OpenAI has been the most public with [its] large announcements, but this is not a trend that’s isolated to them. We are seeing it across the ecosystem.”
Lochmiller also noted that Crusoe’s current development pipeline amounts to 45 gigawatts of capacity, the equivalent of about eight to 10 New York Cities in power.
Crusoe’s current projects include building a 1.2-gigawatt campus for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas, that has a price tag of $12 billion and is due to be completed by mid-2026, along with a 1.8-gigawatt campus for an unknown tech company in Wyoming.
The company’s last funding raise before today was $600 million on a $2.8 billion valuation in December.
Photo: Crusoe
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