Crusoe closes Series E at $10.4B valuation, announces 45GW energy pipeline and operational Abilene AI factory

Crusoe, let me tell you about numeralhq. com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe in the re waiting room. Now he's in the team Ultradome. Welcome to the show. You're looking fantastic. How are you, Chase?

Congratulations are in order. Uh give us the breakdown. What's the news today? Um, you know, today we are announcing the closing of our series E round of funding, valuing the company at 10. 4 billion. Gong. Gong. Another one. Another one. Another one. 10. 4 million. Two gong hits. I don't know. Uh, fantastic. Fantastic.

Um, uh, how are you describing where the company what what you do? It's such a fascinating What exactly do you do?

because yeah I mean you've been doing somewhat of the same thing for a very long time and yet there's been multiple eras in terms of what the and and customer has done there's been where you sit in the stack uh the type of size of project scale of projects so how are you describing the wheelhouse that or the the the the yeah where Crusoe fits yeah I I think uh putting it simply you know Crusoe is uh an AI factory company so what that means we're building um you know these factories that produce intelligence and this is both a hardware problem and a software problem.

Uh and we focus on all of the things ranging from uh cultivating the energy and helping develop the energy resources needed to uh power AI infrastructure. Um we're building out the data centers themselves and redesigning them to fit these largecale accelerated computing clusters.

Um and then we and then we also built out this whole software platform that operates these large scale AI factories so that they can actually be effective in producing intelligence uh and really enable our generation's uh greatest minds and entrepreneurs to do their life's work and help build um and scale their AI applications to impact people around the world.

Is there a superlative that you're chasing in the Neocloud market? Do you want to be the firm that can build bigger than anyone or else or faster than anyone else or more reliable? I mean, obviously you want to win on everything, but is there something that you're chasing that you think is like the true differentiator?

Um, yeah. I I I think uh I I think right now uh speed is the biggest uh focus for the business in terms of uh being able to move very very quickly. It's a very dynamic market.

Um but certainly you know uh reliability, scale, cost um all these things really come into into play and and and ultimately we want to deliver for our customers what they need, what what adds value to them.

Um so you know being able to deliver you know to our cloud customers uh the best price performance uh trade-off for their infrastructure solutions um uh alongside uh a reliable you know well-managed platform I think is you know ultimately our goal.

Um but uh you know I think being able to do that very very quickly right now is is a major major advantage and it's something that's very difficult to replicate when you look at you know kind of what we did in Abalene, Texas uh in terms of you know starting from from nothing uh into uh a large scale AI factory that's uh you know managing that that's operating you know tens of thousands of GPUs at this point um is uh is is is a very important aspect to um you know bringing this infrastructure to life.

So Abalene's is up and running. Yes. So we announced uh recently the first phases of uh uh the 1. 2 gawatt campus are are uperational today. Uh that's incredible because I feel like there there was like this whole press cycle about like oh it's off track and it's like this thing was announced like months ago.

I I expect these things to take years. I I don't know. I was I was I feel like people aren't taking enough of victory lap there. Yeah. No.

And I think there's been um you know Stargate's been this like very overloaded term in terms of you know being this it's a company it's a you know it's a site it's a concept it's a you know it's like what what is Stargate you know I'm still not entirely sure but uh you know there's uh uh I think we got wrapped up a little bit in the uh you know rumors swirling that this thing's behind or you know that uh the company is behind but you know the project has uh uh done extremely well.

People took the most expensive the most the the most ambitious vision and the shortest possible timeline and that became what you were measured against basically. And so it's like unless unless a trillion dollars is in the ground working in 6 months like it's over. It's like wait we never said that.

We said well it rightfully had a lot of pressure because the project got announced via the president. That's not very standard for for you know launch. That's a good tip for startups.

If you if you want a you know spokesperson, president would be a great Tyler Cowan has a quote that's been going around quite a bit recently which is like don't underestimate the elasticity of supply uh in the in the context of uh and it's been going around in the context of energy.

It feels like Crusoe was started on this idea of like there actually is a lot of energy out there and there's real demand for it. You just got to go out and find it. How much does that how much is that ringing true and as you kind of evaluate you know new sites and opportunities for your business?

No, that's absolutely the case and I think that's one of the things that set us apart and enabled us to uh move quickly and build at scale is uh having this energy first approach to developing the infrastructure.

Um part of our announcement today was uh announcing our energy pipeline which you know is in excess of 45 gawatts at this point. Um and uh you know putting into context you know the Abalene campus is 1. 2 gawatt.

Um so you know it's it's it's you know orders of magnitude larger or an order and a half of magnitude and larger in terms of uh overall capacity there. Uh I'm in New York City today. You know it's something you know on the order of you know eight uh New York cities worth of power.

uh it's a it's a very substantial amount of power that's going to be required fundamentally for um AI to scale and and and to really really reach uh the the ambitions and hopes of the industry. Uh last question, we'll let you go.

Um last time you were on, we kind of walked through a little bit of a debunk of the we're going to run out of water for data centers. Uh what's your current thinking on the story that's emerging around like data centers are going to drive up my energy prices? Is that solvable on the short term?

Is this going to be some short-term pain for long-term gain? Uh is it something that you know you need you need to rethink regulation or or just speed up building of new energy? How are you thinking about that question because it seems like it's going to get bigger and bigger. Yeah.

So, um I actually found it fascinating.

There was a report that came out recently that showed uh actually in markets with uh substantial data center investment uh the the the overall cost to rateayers actually came down um you know compared to uh other markets where uh you know there was less digital infrastructure being built where where prices actually went up substantially.

Um and you know I really see this trend playing out uh as a whole because what what ends up happening is uh you know the digital infrastructure players the the folks building the data centers at this point you know a lot of the energy market is saturated and uh there isn't just you know a bunch of free power laying around you know underutilized not doing much you know there's some of that but you know it's becoming more and more scarce which means that in order to realize all of these ambitions that are taking place in AI we have to build out a lot of net new power.

Um, we need to build new power plants. We need to build new creative energy solutions um to to effectively energize this infrastructure. And when data centers are doing that, they're having to build out power capacity um that meets their overall peak demands of the facility.

And um as a result, it ends up, you know, with some incremental power that is being underutilized and can become an asset to other participants in those uh energy markets. and really actually bring down their overall cost of power uh because there's more abundant power.

Um and that really goes in line with you know the Crusoe mission which is accelerating the abundance of energy and intelligence. Uh we really view those two things as the key pillars of progress in this uh chapter for humanity. Yeah, I love it.

I I I think it's definitely uh I mean there's a bunch of different political frameworks where you could use to to understand where this is going, but uh it feels very solvable.

one one uh one last question that probably would would take 10 minutes to properly answer, but how how much are you banking on nuclear on a shorter time horizon, if at all, talking, you know, five fiveyear timeline? Yeah. So, we're really excited with a lot of the advancements um happening in the nuclear space.

Um, you know, we have a number of partnerships across the SMR ecosystem, uh, including a plan to, uh, energize the first SMR powered AI factory in 2027.

Um, so, uh, you know, that's going to be sort of a smaller scale deployment, but, uh, we think we'll be a great template for us to, uh, hopefully scale and and bring new, uh, nuclearpowered uh, AI infrastructure to life.

Um it's also you know this is been a huge priority for Chris Wright uh in terms of you know helping uh create a uh a regulatory framework for nuclear and sort of uh re-evaluating the nuclear the NRC the nuclear regulatory commission uh in terms of you know how do we actually uh enable uh the private sector to build the energy necessary to power uh demands of society data centers you know being a big big component of that.

So, you know, very excited and uh I think it's going to be a huge win. And then, you know, there's also the big uh nuclear plants that, you know, I I'm excited to see come to life again as well.

Uh you know, Westinghouse uh you know, is announcing, you know, a number of very big APW 10000 uh campuses that um you know, we think will play another big part in in terms of getting the power we need uh for intelligence. I'm I'm very excited about that.

I hope that we get all those uh campuses online as fast as possible. Uh well, thank you so much for coming by the show. Sorry to get the late. Uh we will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the mass. Congrats to the whole team. Awesome. Always great to see you. Fantastic progress. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a great weekend. Cheers. Up next, we have Tucker from Orion Technologies. We are running a little bit behind. Let me tell you about Finn. AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2.

And let's bring in Tucker for a quick hit of the gong. Give us the news. Tell us what you're building. We Welcome to the show. Would love to ring the gong for you. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I can't hear you really. It sounds like you're speaking in slow motion. Oh, check. Check. Check. One, two.

Uh, Orion Technologies, you're coming out of stealth. would love to hear about the rays. If you can take us through just the high level, we can ring the gong and maybe we can try and have you back on later. Do we have Tucker? Let's see. We might need to move on if we have technical difficulties.

We can always have you back on the show another day. Um, should we move on? Can you guys hear me? We can hear you. We can hear you. Great. We can hear you. Great. Let's see. I can I can hear you guys, but it it sounds very slow for some reason. My name is Tucker.

I'm the CEO of um I'm the CEO of Orient Technologies and uh we're coming out of stealth after a $3. 5 million prey. Let's go. Jordy, ring that gong. Thank you very much. Uh take us take us one level deeper uh about the problem, the solution, what you're building.

uh and then we do have to move on but please give us uh a little bit more on the progress of the company some of the decisions that you've made how you're thinking about building the company. Yeah. So we are building uh essentially the interoperability layer for manned and unmanned aircraft.

So what does that actually mean? Uh we enable manned and unmanned aircraft to communicate, coordinate and deconlict. And we're starting with heterogeneous assets. So drones built from different vendors within cities and around airports today. Mhm. Congratulations. We're going to have to have you back on later.

We'll do a technical check next time. Uh but have a great rest of your day. Have a good weekend and congrats on the race. Congrats on the raise. We'll talk to you soon. Uh while we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic.

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