Crusoe, the Denver company that designed and built the AI campus in Abilene, Texas, said on Sept. 17 that it has completed the initial closing of a $3.9 billion Series F round at a $30.9 billion post-money valuation β capital that goes almost entirely into land, power and construction.
The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, according to the company’s announcement, with participation from Founders Fund, GIC, NVIDIA, the Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG. Crusoe described the round as oversubscribed and said it represents an initial closing.
For a real estate audience the investor list is as interesting as the number. The national general contractor DPR Construction put money into the round. So did Fundrise and Zigg Capital, both of which invest in real estate and property technology.
Six gigawatts under contract, one gigawatt running
Crusoe said it has more than 6 gigawatts of gross contracted capacity across its data centers and cloud business, of which 1 gigawatt is delivered and operational today. It put total contracted value across the platform at more than $140 billion.
Those are development numbers. A gigawatt of data center capacity is, in physical terms, millions of square feet of specialized building plus the substations, transmission interconnections and generation to feed it β the scale that has made power availability, rather than land, the binding constraint on the sector. RealtyWire has reported on how that constraint is reshaping site selection, including NVIDIA’s stake in Lancium and its 15 gigawatts of powered land.
Crusoe describes itself as the industry’s first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, meaning it originates power, develops the buildings, manufactures components and sells cloud services on top. In the release the company frames power as the starting point rather than a post-siting problem: “Conventional data center developers treat power as a constraint to navigate after site selection. Crusoe starts there instead.” That is the company’s characterization of its competitors as much as of itself.
“We believe AI will usher in an era of abundance: new scientific breakthroughs, unprecedented economic growth, and human prosperity,” said Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and chief executive. “Getting there means controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and we’re grateful to have investors who share that conviction.”
Modular boxes against a years-long build cycle
The clearest construction-side claim in the announcement concerns Crusoe Spark, the company’s modular data center product, which it manufactures in the United States. Crusoe says the units “shorten the timeline of data center construction in the field from years to weeks” and let customers add capacity incrementally rather than commissioning a full campus at once.
That is an unverified vendor claim, not an independent measurement, and it should be read as one. But the direction matters: schedule risk and cost escalation are the two problems the sector keeps running into. RealtyWire covered Cushman & Wakefield research showing data center construction costs jumping 21% per megawatt since 2024. Anything that compresses the field schedule changes the arithmetic on those projects.
Crusoe said its workforce now exceeds 1,800 people across five countries, with new offices in Bellevue, Wash., and New York City. It also said OpenAI trained Astra, which the release calls OpenAI’s first artificial general intelligence, at the Abilene campus Crusoe designed and built β again, the company’s own description of the site’s role.
A former Digital Realty chief joins the board
The same day, Crusoe named three independent directors, one of whom carries direct weight in commercial real estate: Bill Stein, who co-founded Digital Realty Trust, served as its chief investment officer from 2004 to 2014 and as its chief executive from 2014 to 2022. Crusoe said Stein oversaw an increase in the REIT’s market capitalization from $700 million to $50 billion during his tenure. He is now a partner and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure and sits on the board of Host Hotels & Resorts.
“I’ve spent my career financing, operating, and growing digital infrastructure at global scale, and the companies that create lasting value are the ones that recognize early that control of the entire value chain matters,” Stein said in the announcement.
The other two appointments are Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer of Cloudflare, who will chair Crusoe’s audit committee, and JB Straubel, founder and chief executive of Redwood Materials and a Tesla co-founder and former chief technology officer. Crusoe said its Spark units run on a Redwood Materials behind-the-meter microgrid of solar and repurposed electric-vehicle batteries.
On our reading, adding a former public-REIT chief executive and a sitting public-company CFO to a private board is the kind of move that precedes public-market scrutiny. Crusoe has not said it intends to go public, and nothing in either announcement suggests a timetable. It is worth noting alongside the capital markets activity elsewhere in the sector β Vantage Data Centers has been weighing an initial public offering that would be the largest in the industry’s history.
