Crusoe Energy, a company best known for mining cryptocurrencies via flared gas, is to start building permanent data centers for AI customers.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe first launched with a service to deliver containerized data centers to oil wells in the US, where they would harness natural gas that would otherwise be “flared off” and wasted.
Originally the company was using the energy for Bitcoin mining, but later extended its compute services to HPC and AI through its Crusoe Cloud offering.
While it continues to power a significant part of its cloud offering through flared gas sites, the company has also signed colocation deals with third parties.
Now, as it looks to embrace the current AI boom, Crusoe is planning to build its own facilities and host AI infrastructure for third companies.
“We’re moving very quickly into building the AI infrastructure, and we’ve got a big pipeline of opportunities we put together,” Crusoe CEO Cully Cavness told DCD recently, adding that the company is aiming to deliver “gigawatts of new data center capacity.”
“Some of that we’re placing into third-party colocation partners… [or] building our own infrastructure. And increasingly, this is looking like large, permanent building structures rather than the modular data centers that we used in the past,” he added.
Cavness said the company has designed a ‘new high-density data center form factor’ based around being able to get the maximum number of GPUs into a single cluster.
The initial build-out will be a 103MW site, comprising four 25MW wings. Cavness said the site will be able to host 100,000 GPUs on a single integrated network fabric.
This design will be optimized for direct-to-chip liquid cooling or rear door heat exchangers, but the design is flexible enough to include air cooling.
The company will host both its own hardware for its Crusoe Cloud in addition to third-party hardware.
Crusoe is yet to disclose a location or customer for the project, but DCD understands the company is close to announcing a major deal, with more details to be revealed soon.
From flaring modules to bricks and mortar
Crusoe’s move to more permanent hosting locations began late last year when the company announced a deal to locate a number of GPUs in atNorth’s ICE02 data center in Iceland. The company has also partnered with Digital Realty.
In its most recent ESG report published last month, the company said it has around 200MW of deployed capacity; around a third of its Crusoe Cloud offering was powered by gas flare sites, while the remainder was powered by third-party data centers.
The company said it consumed around 460GWh at grid-connected locations and third-party sites during 2023 – around 65 percent of that was from geothermal or hydroelectric sources, the rest was offset via renewable energy purchases.
As well as oil pipelines, the company now offers the service for other stranded energy assets, potentially including solar or wind farms generating excess power that would be “curtailed.”
The company has said it has a pipeline of potential renewable site projects of around ~4GW, and expects to have its first such project under construction in 2024.
“We are working on the launch of our first Digital Renewable Optimization (DRO) site in 2024, which will give us access to more than 100MW of behind-the-meter wind power,” the company said in the report. “In addition, we are looking at opportunities to build out on-site renewable generation capacities at our sites to support the energy transition and sustainably power our digital infrastructure.”
When asked about locations, Cavness told DCD the company is focused on North America and Europe. He added Latin America and the Middle East “make sense” over time, while Asia would be “further down” the roadmap.
Funds and friends
Crusoe has raised more than $600 million in funding across multiple funding rounds, with investors including Mubadala and the Oman Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Bain Capital Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, G2, and others.
Cavness told DCD it has raised $700 million in equity to date and more than $1 billion in non-dilutive capital. The company is in the process of launching its Series D funding round and next wave of credit financing.
Crusoe has previously acquired cryptomining firm Great American Mining, manufacturing firm Easter-Owens, and some assets from cryptomining firm Compute North, The company has also signed a patent sharing agreement with crypto firm Lancium, giving Crusoe access to IP for ramping data center load up and down.
Last year Crusoe secured $200 million to buy 20,000 Nvidia GPUs to power its cloud offering, and said it will deploy HPE Cray XD supercomputers customers can use to train large-scale AI models. On its…
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