Crusoe, the rumored OpenAI provider for the data center, has received $686M in new funding, filings show

Crusoe Energy, a data center in the first building that will reportedly be leased by Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is in the process of raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing.

The filing shows that Crusoe has raised $686 million of the $818 million it hopes to raise. Seventy investors have contributed to this category so far, per file.

“A company in our growth stage is always talking to investors,” a Crusoe spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Crusoe was in talks to raise around $500 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund in partnership with Felicis Ventures. It seems that investors were keen to get a bigger price, which is likely to come in at a higher price than the rumored three billion dollars – which is already double the previous price of Crusoe.

If Crusoe is successful in raising $818 million, it will bring the startup’s total funding to nearly $1.5 billion in equity and debt. Late last year, Crusoe secured a $200 million loan using data center chips as collateral to buy thousands of AI processors.

Crusoe was launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency business, powering its data centers with natural gas that can be “burned” and spent. Like many crypto mining operations, Crusoe became focused as AI rose, finding deals with AI companies to provide efficient computing infrastructure and AI.

In early October, Crusoe announced it would enter into a $3.4 billion joint venture with asset manager Blue Owl Capital to build a large data center in Abilene, Texas. The campus is expected to be leased to Oracle, which will in turn lease it to Microsoft and its close partner, OpenAI.

There is a thriving market for “neocloud” startups that are building low-cost, high-demand AI clouds.

CoreWeave, a GPU infrastructure provider, has raised more than $12 million in a series of deals over the past 18 months. Lambda Labs in early April received a special financing vehicle of up to $500 million. Non-profit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced it was investing $500 million in GPU-enabled data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts productive AI research, in March raised $106 million in a round led by Salesforce.

The environmental impact of buildings can be significant. IDC expects global data center electricity consumption to more than double between 2023 and 2028. And according to Morgan Stanley, data center technology providers will create emissions equivalent to 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2030.