Image Credits: Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle / Getty Images
Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular ‘AI factories’
4:25 PM PDT · September 17, 2026
Data center developer Crusoe said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The massive round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG also participated, according to Crusoe.
Crusoe also announced three new board members, including Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure, and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla’s board. Straubel already has ties to Crusoe; he personally invested in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.
The eight-year-old company’s fresh capital infusion will help finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as smaller, modular AI factories that can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere.
By manufacturing these modular data centers, called Spark, at its own facilities, Crusoe can deploy compute capacity quickly and without the need for large construction workforces. The smaller centers could also help Crusoe sidestep, at least in part, another major obstacle facing data center developers: backlash from local communities protesting massive complexes near their neighborhoods.
Crusoe co-founder and CEO, who is pictured above, said in a statement he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, but to get there will mean “controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and we’re grateful to have investors who share that conviction.”
The company makes money by leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, by renting out its own GPUs, and by selling compute power used to run AI models, known as inference.
This three-pronged business model has helped make Crusoe one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies. Crusoe recently signed a massive $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported.
The company recently met with investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to discuss a potential IPO in the near future, Axios reported last month.
The fresh fundraise comes 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October.
The company was founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas, but pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power skyrocketed. Crusoe’s customers include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Topics
AI, crusoe, data centers, Hardware, Venture
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Marina Temkin
Reporter, Venture
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.
You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal.
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How Bain Capital Ventures plans to deploy its fresh $1.6B fund
5:57 AM PDT · September 17, 2026
Bain Capital Ventures ( BCV), the venture division of private equity firm Bain Capital, has raised a new $1.6 billion fund, which is 14% larger than its previous $1.4 billion fund the firm announced three years ago.
Like many other venture investors, BCV says it will use the fresh funds to back startups primarily focused on AI. The firm believes artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as agents performing many tasks as well as humans can, has already arrived, and the next wave of startups will not only harness its power, but also build the infrastructure needed to make it run efficiently.
Some of the main themes that will be the most relevant in what the firm calls “the post-AGI era” include infrastructure, healthcare, physical AI, and security, said partner Kevin Zhang.
He said BCV aims to fund compute infrastructure until intelligence becomes “too cheap to meter,” meaning that the cost of running AI drops to nearly zero. He pointed to one company in BCV’s portfolio that can help with this mission: data center developer Crusoe, which is reportedly valued at $30 billion and viewed as a near-term IPO candidate. BCV originally led Crusoe’s Series A in 2019, back when it focused on crypto mining.
The firm wants to focus on healthcare because it believes the sector may be vastly transformed by AI. Security, meanwhile, has recently become a matter of national debate after AI agents went rogue during training, and BCV believes there’s much potential to bet on in this space. Some of the firm’s significant investments in these sectors include Loyal, a longevity startup aimed at pets, and Dream, an AI-powered defender of national infrastructure.
BCV stands apart from other VC firms, according to Zhang, thanks to its affiliation with Bain Capital, which provides deep expertise and financial products across credit, real estate, insurance, and private equity. “BCV can support founders not just with equity capital, but with debt facilities, infrastructure partnerships, and real-economy relationships,” he said.
From the new fund, the firm’s 11th, BCV intends to invest in 30 to 40 companies, primarily at the seed through Series B stages. Unlike most VC firms where a single partner champions a deal, BCV’s partners often team up in pairs or trios to back a specific investment, Zhang said.
“We need to have enough mind space and time to really be thoughtful partners to every team we work with,” he said.
Topics
bain capital ventures, Fundraising, Venture, venture capital funds
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Marina Temkin
Reporter, Venture
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.
You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal.
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