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By · Published November 4, 2026 · 22 min read

Crusoe Valuation and Revenue: How It Grew to $30.9B

Crusoe hit a $30.9B valuation in September 2026, with 2026 revenue reported near $2B. See every round from seed to Series F, revenue by year and 9 moves.

Crusoe is worth $30.9 billion.

That is the post-money valuation from the $3.9 billion Series F that Crusoe announced on September 17, 2026, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. As of October 2026 it is the company's latest confirmed valuation. Crusoe is still private, although Axios reported in August 2026 that it had held IPO talks with JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Crusoe does not publish revenue. The best current figure comes from Newcomer, which reported in September 2026 that financials it obtained show Crusoe on track for about $2 billion in revenue in 2026. That would be roughly 8 times the $250 million Crusoe made in 2024, according to The Information's reporting as summarized by The Logic.

What Crusoe does disclose is contracts. In the Series F announcement it claimed more than $140 billion in total contracted value, more than 6 gigawatts of contracted capacity, and 1 gigawatt already delivered and running.

The one-line reason it grew: Crusoe spent six years learning to put computers next to cheap, stranded power to mine bitcoin, then pointed that skill at AI just as power became the bottleneck. That landed it the job of building OpenAI's flagship Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas.

Here is how it happened.

Crusoe's growth in one table

DateMilestone
2018Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness start Crusoe in Denver to turn flared natural gas into computing power
January 2019Bain Capital Ventures co-leads the seed round
December 2019Raises a $30M Series A plus $40M of project financing
April 2021Raises a $128M Series B led by Valor with 40 flare-powered data centers running
April 2022Raises a $350M Series C led by G2 Venture Partners at a reported $1.75B valuation
July 2024Announces a 200 MW AI data center in Abilene, planned to grow to 1.2 GW
October 2024Signs a $3.4B joint venture with Blue Owl and Primary Digital to fund the first Abilene buildings
December 2024Raises a $600M Series D at $2.8B led by Founders Fund; Crusoe Cloud becomes generally available
January 2025Stargate is announced and Larry Ellison names Abilene as the first site
March 2025Expands Abilene to 1.2 GW across eight buildings
March 2025Agrees to sell its bitcoin mining business to NYDIG
May 2025Second phase of a $15B Abilene joint venture funds six more buildings
June 2025Secures a $750M Brookfield credit facility
June 2025Launches Crusoe Spark modular data centers
September 2025First two Abilene buildings go live on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
October 2025Raises a $1.375B Series E at more than $10B
November 2025Employee share sale at about $13B, Reuters reports citing The Information
December 2025Former MongoDB finance chief Michael Gordon becomes COO and CFO
March 2026Oracle and OpenAI drop an Abilene expansion, Reuters reports citing Bloomberg
March 2026Microsoft takes a new 900 MW campus next door
June 2026Pauses its Wyoming campus at a customer's request
August 2026IPO talks with four banks are reported by Axios
September 2026A $13B, five-year Jane Street cloud deal is reported by Bloomberg
September 2026Raises the $3.9B Series F at $30.9B

The valuation went from $2.8 billion to $30.9 billion in 21 months. The more useful question is how a company that started by burning oilfield gas to mine bitcoin ended up there.

1. Crusoe turned wasted gas into a computing business

Crusoe began with a problem in the oil field.

When oil wells are drilled far from pipelines, the natural gas that comes up with the oil often has nowhere to go. Producers burn it off on site, which is called flaring. Lochmiller told TechCrunch in 2021 that roughly 1.4 billion cubic feet of gas was flared every day in the US alone.

The two founders came at it from opposite ends. Lochmiller had studied math and physics at MIT, worked as a quant trader and was a partner at the crypto fund Polychain Capital. Cavness, a geology graduate with an Oxford MBA, came from what Lochmiller called a third-generation oil and gas family.

The idea came together in 2018. Lochmiller had just returned from climbing Mount Everest and went on a climbing trip in Colorado with Cavness, a friend from high school. On the Acquired podcast, he described the pitch they arrived at: solve computing's problem of expensive power by solving oil's problem of gas that nobody could use.

Crusoe called the product Digital Flare Mitigation. It piped the gas into generators, made electricity on site and used it to run containerized computers parked at the wellhead. In October 2019 the company had 11 full-time employees and had already eliminated more than 35 million cubic feet of flaring.

2. Bitcoin let Crusoe scale before AI customers existed

The computers in those containers mostly mined bitcoin.

That was deliberate. On the Acquired podcast, Lochmiller said Crusoe "probably never would have gotten off the ground" if it had started by building a cloud. An oil company wanted its flare gone immediately, and no AI customer would wait years for a remote data center to be ready.

Bitcoin solved both sides at once. Anyone can join the network, mining can be switched on or off without notice, and remote locations with slow internet barely matter. Lochmiller called it "a power sponge" that could soak up whatever energy was available.

So Crusoe scaled the business that was ready to buy. By April 2021 it ran 40 flare-powered data centers in four states. At the time, about 80% of its operations were bitcoin mining. A year later it had 86 units running and 157 employees.

The years in bitcoin taught Crusoe skills that later mattered for AI. It learned to buy generators and electrical gear in volume, finance hardware with project debt, and move computers to wherever the power was. Lochmiller said Crusoe even became the largest customer of the fabrication shop that built its containers.

The investors who funded that phase stayed for the next one. Valor and Founders Fund backed the bitcoin-era rounds and every AI-era round since, and Atreides, a Series C investor, co-led the 2026 Series F.

3. Crusoe launched a GPU cloud before the AI boom

Crusoe started renting out GPUs long before ChatGPT.

In 2021, Lochmiller described the cloud as a private alpha with a few test customers. Early users included MIT's computer science and AI lab and the protein-folding project Folding@Home. Crusoe's April 2022 Series C announcement said the money would accelerate the launch of CrusoeCloud. The cloud business launched that year, according to ION Analytics.

The timing turned out to be valuable, because AI chips are power-hungry in a way ordinary data centers were not built for. On Acquired in August 2023, Lochmiller said a single Nvidia H100 server needs a power budget of about 12 kilowatts, while a standard data center rack is often built for 7. Crusoe already had GPU experience and the habit of finding power that other operators could not reach.

By December 2024, when it raised its Series D, Crusoe made the cloud generally available for training, fine-tuning and inference. Nvidia was an investor in that round.

4. Crusoe bet the company on one campus in Abilene

The move that changed Crusoe's size was a single site in West Texas.

In July 2024, Crusoe announced it was building a 200 MW AI data center at the Lancium Clean Campus outside Abilene, with plans to expand to 1.2 gigawatts. Lancium had the land and a large grid connection. Crusoe would design, build and own the buildings.

Three months later the first phase was fully leased to a Fortune 100 hyperscale tenant. DCD reported that The Information had identified the tenant as Oracle, with OpenAI as the end user.

Then Abilene became national news. On January 21, 2025, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced the Stargate Project, a plan to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure. At the White House, Larry Ellison said Abilene was the first location and that construction was already underway.

Crusoe kept building. In March 2025 it started six more buildings, taking the campus to eight buildings, about 4 million square feet and 1.2 GW. Each building was designed to run up to 50,000 Nvidia GB200 NVL72s on a single network fabric.

Speed became the selling point. Construction began in June 2024 and the first two buildings were energized within a year, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by September 2025. On its September 2026 earnings call, Oracle said six of the eight buildings, or 618 megawatts, had been delivered and that OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra had been trained at the site.

5. Crusoe used other people's balance sheets

A 1.2 GW campus costs far more than a startup can raise in equity. Crusoe's answer was to split the project from the company.

The first two buildings were funded through a $3.4 billion joint venture in which funds managed by Blue Owl and Primary Digital Infrastructure sponsored the build. The expansion followed the same pattern on a larger scale, through a $15 billion joint venture announced in May 2025. A day later, Newmark said it had arranged a $7.1 billion construction loan led by J.P. Morgan for that phase.

At the company level, Crusoe stacked up debt for its own growth. It announced a $225 million credit facility from Upper90 in early 2025 and then a $750 million facility from Brookfield in June. Its lawyers said the Brookfield loan was secured against at least eight pending hyperscale projects.

"We're in a very capex-heavy business," Lochmiller told CNBC at the time.

This structure is why Crusoe's equity rounds look small next to its projects. The company supplies the know-how, the speed and a slice of the equity. Infrastructure investors and banks supply most of the steel.

6. Crusoe sold the business it was founded on

In March 2025, Crusoe agreed to sell its bitcoin mining operation, including the original Digital Flare Mitigation business, to the bitcoin and power firm NYDIG.

It was not a small unit. The deal covered more than 425 modular data centers across seven US states and Argentina, which CNBC said accounted for roughly 1% of global bitcoin mining. About 135 Crusoe employees moved to NYDIG, and terms were not disclosed.

Crusoe kept a stake. CNBC reported that Crusoe would become a major equity holder in the combined business, second only to NYDIG's parent, Stone Ridge.

The sale did two things. It let management spend all its time on AI infrastructure, and it removed a volatile crypto business from the story Crusoe told investors and customers. In its Series E announcement seven months later, Crusoe framed the divestiture as part of its exclusive focus on AI.

7. Crusoe treated power as the product

Most data center developers find a site and then worry about electricity. Crusoe calls its approach "energy-first," and its history explains why.

As AI campuses grew, the flare gas was replaced by bigger sources, but the logic stayed the same: secure the power, then build. Crusoe ordered 29 GE Vernova gas turbines between December 2024 and June 2025, together expected to supply nearly 1 gigawatt. By October 2025, Crusoe said its power pipeline exceeded 45 gigawatts.

It also tried less common sources. In June 2025, Crusoe and Redwood Materials switched on a 12 MW solar microgrid backed by second-life EV batteries to run Crusoe's modular data centers in Nevada. After seven months at 99.2% availability, the two companies expanded it from 4 to 24 units in March 2026.

The energy-first approach showed up again when a tenant walked away. In March 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had dropped plans to expand Abilene beyond 1.2 GW after negotiations dragged over financing and OpenAI's changing needs. Three weeks later, Crusoe announced a 900 MW campus on adjacent land for Microsoft, with its own on-site power plant.

That deal takes the projected capacity across the whole Abilene site to about 2.1 GW. The first Microsoft building is expected to be energized in mid-2027.

8. Crusoe built factories, not just data centers

Crusoe now manufactures much of the equipment that goes into its sites.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it makes switchgear, switchboards, enclosures and copper busbar. When it opened a second Tulsa plant in September 2026, Crusoe said its manufacturing footprint had reached roughly 1 million square feet and that it had supplied more than 2,500 switchboards to Abilene. It said it can turn some components around in days, when the rest of the industry often waits months.

The second product is the data center itself. Crusoe Spark, launched in June 2025, is a prefabricated AI data center that arrives with power distribution, cooling, fire suppression and GPU racks built in. Crusoe says units can be delivered in as little as three months.

In March 2026 it announced a 352,000-square-foot Spark factory in Brighton, Colorado, a commitment of more than $200 million. In October 2026, Crusoe said Spark units running Nvidia HGX B300 systems had matched traditional data centers on Nvidia's training benchmarks.

This is the bitcoin playbook again, now at a larger scale. Containers that could be dropped at a wellhead became modules that can be dropped next to any large power source. TechCrunch noted that smaller modular sites could also help Crusoe sidestep some local opposition to giant campuses.

9. Crusoe moved up the stack into cloud and inference

Leasing buildings to Oracle is large but lumpy. Selling compute directly is where Crusoe is pushing next.

TechCrunch described three ways Crusoe makes money: leasing data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling inference, the compute used to run AI models. The last two run through Crusoe Cloud.

The cloud has been growing faster than the company as a whole. In a February 2026 post, Crusoe said 2025 brought 150% growth in cloud ARR, about 17 times more added contract value than the year before, and about 70% more new customers. By September 2026 it said cloud bookings were up more than 20 times year over year.

Named cloud customers include Cursor, Fireworks, Together AI, Cognition, Figure and Perplexity. The biggest is Jane Street, which signed a five-year cloud contract worth about $13 billion, according to Bloomberg. Crusoe has not announced that deal itself.

Inference is the newest layer. Crusoe launched Managed Inference in November 2025, helped by its August 2025 acquisition of the Israeli GPU software startup Atero. In September 2026, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab signed a $65 million annual agreement to run its open models on it, and Crusoe said Managed Inference had passed $100 million in contracted ARR less than a year after launch.

The point of the cloud is margin and control. A data center lease captures rent. A cloud customer pays for the power, the building, the GPUs and the software on top, all of which Crusoe now owns.

How fast did Crusoe grow?

Crusoe has never published audited financials, so every revenue number below is either a company metric or a report based on documents and sources.

Here is the clearest version:

If those figures hold, revenue roughly doubled in 2025 and roughly quadrupled in 2026. The jump lines up with Abilene: the first buildings came online in late 2025 and most of the rest were handed over during 2026.

The valuation moved faster than revenue:

At $30.9 billion, investors are paying about 15 times the reported 2026 revenue. They are pricing the contracts more than the current income: Crusoe's claimed $140 billion in contracted value is more than four times its valuation.

The headcount tells the same story. Crusoe had 11 full-time employees in 2019 and 157 in 2022. By September 2026 it said it had a workforce of more than 1,800 across five countries.

Crusoe's growth loop

Crusoe's growth can be reduced to one loop:

  1. Find power that others cannot reach quickly.
  2. Build compute next to it faster than anyone else.
  3. Use that speed to win a large, long-term tenant.
  4. Use the tenant's contract to raise project finance and new equity.
  5. Spend the capital on more power, more factories and more GPUs.
  6. Sell that capacity again, increasingly as cloud and inference.

Each turn makes the next one easier. Abilene gave Crusoe the proof it needed to sign Microsoft. The Microsoft and Jane Street contracts helped it raise the Series F. The Series F pays for factories that make the next site faster to build.

What Crusoe did differently

It started where the customer was impatient

Crusoe picked a buyer, the bitcoin network, that would take any amount of compute immediately. That let it build real infrastructure and real operations years before AI labs were ready to pay for them.

It kept the hard physical layer

Crusoe chose to own power, construction, electrical manufacturing and the cloud. In the Series F announcement, Lochmiller described the goal as "controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens."

It made speed the product

Energizing the first Abilene buildings in under a year became Crusoe's main sales argument. Every later announcement, from Microsoft to Spark, leads with how fast the capacity arrives.

It let go of its origin story

Crusoe sold the flare-gas bitcoin business that had defined it for six years. That made the company simpler to finance and simpler for AI customers to trust.

It financed projects, not just the company

By putting big campuses into joint ventures with infrastructure investors, Crusoe could take on gigawatt projects while raising comparatively modest equity.

What could slow Crusoe down?

The first risk is customer concentration. Crusoe's biggest contracts sit with a handful of very large customers: Oracle and OpenAI, Microsoft and, reportedly, Jane Street. Oracle and OpenAI's decision in March 2026 not to expand Abilene showed how quickly a planned phase can disappear, even if Microsoft filled the gap.

The second is execution. In June 2026, Crusoe paused its 1.8 GW Wyoming campus at its customer's request. Bloomberg later reported that Crusoe was being pushed aside after Google raised concerns about costs and timing. In July, DCD reported that a Google subsidiary had taken over the project.

The third is capital. Crusoe's model needs a steady supply of equity, project finance and credit, and it depends on GPU prices and AI demand staying high enough to service that debt. Shares of rival CoreWeave plunged the day after the IPO talks were reported, Investor's Business Daily noted, a reminder of how quickly public investors can turn on the sector.

The fourth is politics. Newcomer's September 2026 report framed Crusoe's growth against a building backlash against data centers, and Lochmiller told Newcomer that better marketing can calm the political uproar.

The fifth is disclosure. Crusoe's revenue figures are leaked or reported, not audited. If it goes public, investors will see its margins, debt and customer concentration in full for the first time.

Borrowing Crusoe's habit of publishing proof

Crusoe turned each milestone, from energizing Abilene in under a year to 99.2% uptime in Nevada, into a public announcement that did part of the selling. Okara's Writer Agent drafts strategy-led articles about your own milestones and can publish them. The LinkedIn Agent drafts the posts that put them in front of buyers.

More startup growth stories

Frequently asked questions

What is Crusoe's valuation?

Crusoe was valued at $30.9 billion post-money in its $3.9 billion Series F, announced on September 17, 2026. That is up from more than $10 billion at its Series E in October 2025 and $2.8 billion at its Series D in December 2024. As of October 2026 Crusoe is private, and Axios has reported early IPO talks with four banks.

How much revenue does Crusoe make?

Crusoe does not disclose revenue. Newcomer reported in September 2026 that Crusoe is on track for about $2 billion in revenue in 2026. Earlier reporting from The Information put 2024 revenue at about $250 million and projected about $500 million for 2025.

How much funding has Crusoe raised?

Crusoe's announced equity rounds add up to roughly $6.4 billion: a $30 million Series A, $128 million Series B, $350 million Series C, $600 million Series D, $1.375 billion Series E and $3.9 billion Series F, plus an undisclosed seed. It has also raised debt, including a $750 million Brookfield facility, while its Abilene campus was financed separately through a $15 billion joint venture.

Who founded Crusoe?

Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness founded Crusoe in Denver in 2018. Lochmiller, the CEO, was a quant trader and a partner at Polychain Capital. Cavness, now President and Chief Strategy Officer, came from an oil and gas family and had worked on oil and gas deals.

Does Crusoe still mine bitcoin?

No. In March 2025, Crusoe agreed to sell its bitcoin mining and flare-gas business to NYDIG, including more than 425 modular data centers and about 135 employees. Crusoe kept an equity stake in the combined business.

What is Crusoe's role in Stargate?

Crusoe designed, built and owns the Abilene, Texas campus that Oracle leases and runs for OpenAI, the first Stargate site. The campus is planned at eight buildings and 1.2 GW, and Oracle said in September 2026 that six buildings, or 618 MW, had been delivered.

Who are Crusoe's customers?

Crusoe's infrastructure customers include Oracle and OpenAI at Abilene and Microsoft at a new 900 MW campus next door, and Bloomberg has reported contracts with Meta. Cloud customers named by Crusoe include Cursor, Fireworks, Together AI, Cognition, Figure, Perplexity and Thinking Machines Lab. Bloomberg reported a five-year, roughly $13 billion cloud deal with Jane Street.

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