AI Evolution: Merchants of Compute

Crusoe is changing the future of Neo Clouds. Editor’s Note: AI Evolution is a new series I’m doing that goes out at 12:00 PM Eastern Time, with a focus on AI related breakthroughs and macro developments that are key to the industry’s future. I’m not sure of the cadence rate of these articles yet but they are meant to be short and easy to read/skim about pivotal can’t miss moments in AI development and AI history useful for a wide range of readers including investors, executives, AI news fanatics and venture capitalists. Good Afternoon, The incredible Capex by BigTech have created massive Neo Clouds that specialize in AI Infrastructure with GPU-as-a-Service business models at the most physical level of compute. The biggest of these Neo Clouds with the top financing and biggest customers are going to become massively powerful companies. Many of the more innovative and well funded Neo Clouds have yet to go public. On September 17th, 2026 Crusoe confirmed it raised a $3.9 Billion Series F round. Companies like Crusoe and Nscale yet to go public have a lot of momentum to catch up larger Neo Clouds like CoreWeave and Nebius. Crusoe is now the most backed private neocloud in terms of equity, enabling it to get significant debt for expansion. They are a vertically integrated company independent from grid readiness that has overcome early reliance in customer concentration with OpenAI, now serving Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Jane Street. They are backed not just by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund but by several of the world’s top Sovereign Wealth Funds and major Tech corporations. Their most recent valuation of $30.9 Billion means its 3x their last round. and they have over 1 GW (gigawatt) of operational power capacity deployed, alongside more than 6 GW of gross contracted capacity in pipeline and development. In the 2026 to 2030 period I’m bullish on what I’m seeing from them. “They've been building datacenters end-to-end on oil fields using stranded gas for electricity generation and then expanded to building wherever they saw surplus of electricity. They learned to build in 6 months vs 2 years for competition. In parallel, they managed to develop the best-performing software that is letting their customers to get the most from the usage of GPUs.”The company was co-founded in 2018 in Denver, Colorado, by Chase Lochmiller (a former quantitative trader with an MIT math background and Stanford AI degree) and Cully Cavness (a geophysicist and energy investment banker).The Rise of On-Demand Modular AI Factories: Crusoe Vertically integrated Denver-based Crusoe can build huge datacenter campuses but importantly they are among the world leaders in modular smaller datacenters that they call AI Factories. In my study of Neo Clouds, Crusoe aren’t just Nvidia backed, they have the most diversified and high-quality investors. Their Modular "Spark" units are deployable, off-grid micro-data center capacity designed to scale incrementally near underutilized energy sources. In a world of bottlenecks, from energy to HBM, Crusoe has absurd advantages over their competitors for big contracts with BigTech. UBS, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley all see 2027 Capex from Hyperscalers including Oracle and major Neo Clouds to be around $1.4 Trillion that will be between 42% and 52% more than this year of 2026. This means that the dominant Neo Clouds could become sizeable companies by 2030 and beyond. While this sort of Capex acceleration can’t keep growing at these rates indefinitely due to various reasons Crusoe is uniquely positioned and no longer overly concentrated in its OpenAI ties of its Abilene, Texas project. The recent Series F co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners, and includes participation from Mubadala Capital, the asset management subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG also participated. In 2025, Crusoe’s bookings grew 5x and reported 20x+ year-over-year growth. In my opinion Crusoe have better ties with BigTech heavyweights than CoreWeave or Nebius along with can’t miss financing with a significant Middle East backing. Hard to imagine that just two years ago during their Series D, their valuation was more than ten times less. Launched in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas, Crusoe has since pivoted into a major AI infrastructure and cloud provider and on pace to be among the biggest and possibly the biggest by 2030. The key to their modular AI Factories means they can by-pass energy grid delays since they directly manufactures prefabricated server modules, power blocks, and electrical equipment skids in their dedicated manufacturing facilities. Crusoe’s deep vertical integration that spans power generation, physical data center construction, and managed cloud software with excellent BigTech relationships gives them a competitive edge. Their experience using the capture stranded or flared natural gas, geothermal energy, with a deep expertise in modular, off-grid power generation is exactly what the industry and BigTech needs at this moment of datacenter moratoriums, bottlenecks and power delays. On September 3rd, 2026 Crusoe announced a huge deal with quantitative trading firm Jane Street. Valued at approximately $13 billion over 5 years that in my mind gives them a huge advantage when they go public. This for me was the big signal that Crusoe was chosen to be a winner in the Neo Cloud sector giving them untold major strategic, financial, and institutional advantages. Crusoe had already with Lancium and major hyperscalers to construct a massive 1.2-gigawatt AI data center campus in Abilene, Texas. The deal with Jane Street gives Crusoe an ARR pipeline that essentially secures their already bright future. I would be shocked if Crusoe isn’t the biggest pure play Neo Cloud by 2030 and likely a lot sooner in terms of market valuation. Crusoe will go public in 2027 and given their relative size is likely a better investment than either OpenAI or Anthropic. AI Infrastructure is just such a capital intensive industry and so the ones with the best financing and relationships and technology (speed) are most likely to win. Nebius has a market cap of $61 Billion today, but I don’t see a Russian founded European Neo Cloud competing with the likes of Crusoe, CoreWeave and other U.S. players in the long-run. As you might know, Nebius grew out of the international assets of Yandex, the Russian tech giant co-founded by Akady Volozh. Akady is actually Israeli-Kazakh but did business in Russia. Nebius masquerades as a Europe Sovereign Neo Cloud as part of its branding. I have argued that London based Nsclae is much more likely to take on that role with its Norway ties elsewhere. Crusoe has now secured an improved Board1, a pantheon of financers, a major customer in Jane Street and a winning formula in modular AI Infra with Spark. While it generates revenue through data-center leasing, GPU rentals and AI inference services its expanding Spark considerably in late 2026 and in 2027. Spark will usher in an era of modular AI factories designed to be manufactured and transported to power-rich locations that is the primary answer to datacenter moratoriums and energy bottlenecks. While BigAI have to slow down due to being compute constrained, I anticipate bigger deals with Crusoe in the immediate years ahead. They are no longer just for huge customers like Oracle, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those days are over. Just yesterday they got a smaller deal with Thinking Machines Lab. Abilene sized AI clusters are not the future. In an era where hyperscaler Cloud leaders are severely compute constrained speed is of the essence. Modular AI factories means Crusoe can expand their backlog, contracts, ARR and momentum faster. Crusoe Spark are essentially what you might expect: turnkey, prefabricated modular AI data centers designed to bring high-density, low-latency computing directly to the network’s edge.Spark by Crusoe. Units can be delivered within three months, perhaps even faster by now. Each self-contained unit is slightly larger than a shipping container (covering roughly 900 square feet) and delivers about 1 megawatt of capacity. Crusoe manufactures its proprietary Spark modular AI factory units at its plant near Denver, Colorado. The Denver facility is designed to produce up to 1 GW of Spark capacity annually, with deployments actively rolling out throughout 2026. Spark in my view, enables Crusoe to scale differently and potentially much faster. We’ll know a lot more when we see an S-1 before they are ready to go public. That they did a Series F instead of going public earlier in 2026 was the right move. While Neo Clouds have received a lot of hype on public markets in 2025 and now 2026, much of the impressive companies are still private. To end the article I’ll just give you a shortlist of some of the more impressive names in case you are interested. NscaleCrusoeLamba Fluidstack Together AI RunPodVoltage ParkTensor WaveFirmus TechnologiesVast.AI (Vast Data) BasetenModalVultrFireworks AI And so many others. With Spark I think Crusoe is attempting to make AI compute deployment more flexible and reliable in an era of uncertainty, bottlenecks but while the demand for compute continues to accelerate and in a world where compute constraint isn’t the exception, it’s the new normal. 1Crusoe has also added three directors: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Primary Digital Infrastructure partner and CIO Bill Stein, and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel.