Chase Lochmiller reveals Crusoe Series F co-led by Atreides, Valor, and Mubadala as Abilene campus buildings 3–8 come online

Crusoe closes Series F as Abilene campus scales to eight buildings

Crusoe has closed its Series F, co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. TPG, QIA (Qatar Investment Authority), Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, and GIC participated. The round amount was not disclosed.

The timing tracks with a significant expansion at Crusoe's Abilene, Texas campus. Buildings one and two, the initial footprint underpinning contracts with Oracle and OpenAI, are already operational and were used to train Astra. Buildings three through six are now online, with seven and eight expected before year-end. The full eight-building campus will roughly quadruple compute capacity relative to the original two-building footprint.

Lochmiller says the campus was designed from the start around a single question: how do you build a gigawatt-scale computer that can function as one coherent cluster for training frontier models? The Abilene buildout is the answer to that.

“The series F round of funding was co led by Atreides, Valor Equity Partners, and Mubadala. And we had a number of great supporting investors alongside it. Folks like TPG, QIA, Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, GIC. ... The first two buildings, which were the initial contract that we did with Oracle and OpenAI, have led to the training of Astra.”

Spark and the inference layer

Alongside the large campus play, Crusoe is pushing a smaller-footprint product called Crusoe Spark, aimed at inference rather than training. Lochmiller argues that serving inference at scale doesn't require gigawatt campuses — it requires many smaller clusters deployed close to where demand is. Spark is designed to plug into pockets of available grid capacity in the 10 to 100 megawatt range, which Lochmiller says are far more accessible than single-node gigawatt connections given current transmission and distribution constraints. He argues this can actually help utilities balance load and lower costs for local ratepayers.

Energy strategy

Crusoe's energy mix is broadening. Lochmiller highlights a solar-plus-second-life-EV-battery microgrid built with partner Redwood Materials, which he says powers its AI factories at 99%-plus from solar. He also points to a planned SMR-powered AI factory with Ollo, targeted to go live by mid-2027, as the first of its kind.

The company's founding logic — capturing stranded or wasted energy to power compute, named after Robinson Crusoe's resourcefulness — has scaled from a 25-kilowatt first rack into gigawatt campus infrastructure. That first rack is apparently destined for a Crusoe museum.

The investor mix in the Series F, spanning Gulf sovereign capital, long-only growth funds, and venture, reflects the capital-intensity of what Crusoe is building — and the strategic interest from state-backed investors in owning a piece of AI infrastructure before the next wave of model training begins.