Crusoe raised $3.9 billion in a round co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Mubadala Investment, valuing it at about $30.9 billion, according to Anissa Gardizy at The Wall Street Journal. The company spent two years on the Abilene, Texas campus that Oracle rents to OpenAI, and it’s putting this round into Spark, small data centers it manufactures in its own factories and trucks to sites that already have power. CEO Chase Lochmiller said serving models to users takes far fewer chips than training them, so “you don’t actually need an Abilene to do that,” and building the units in a factory also skips the months of planning and local coordination a new campus needs. Crusoe’s inference business went from almost no revenue in January to a $100 million run rate by summer.
