Crusoe is worth 30.9 billion dollars ten months after it was worth 10: data centres now get loaded onto a lorry

An eight-year-old firm that started out mining cryptocurrency on flared natural gas is now worth 30.9 billion dollars. Crusoe announced on Thursday that it had raised 3.9 billion dollars in a Series F round co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG also joined.

The more telling figure is the one from ten months ago. In October the same firm raised 1.38 billion dollars at a valuation of 10 billion. In ten months its value has tripled, and that did not happen because it discovered something new - it happened because everyone building artificial intelligence simultaneously realised they are short of power and space.

The money goes on two things. The first is the existing data centres, among them the large facility in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI. The second is more interesting: modular units called Spark, which the company builds in its own plants, transports by lorry and plugs in wherever there is a strong enough power source. No construction site, no hundreds of workers, no years of permits.

The announcement says this deploys computing power faster. There is a second reason that was not put front and centre - this is how you get around the resistance of people who live next to these complexes. That topic is no longer marginal: seven in ten Americans do not want a data centre in their neighbourhood. A smaller facility, fewer neighbours, fewer questions. The infrastructure does not disappear, it just stops looking like infrastructure.

The business model stands on three legs: renting space to clients who bring their own graphics processors, leasing out its own processors, and selling computing power for running models. According to published reports, the firm recently signed a five-year contract worth 13 billion dollars to supply the trading firm Jane Street with processors and infrastructure. Its clients include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. Company representatives, again according to published reports, have spoken with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about a possible stock market listing.

Co-founder and chief executive Chase Lochmiller says in his statement that he believes artificial intelligence brings an era of abundance, but that the road to it means "control over the infrastructure from electrons to tokens". The sentence sounds like a vision. Read soberly, it means one supplier wants to hold both the generation of electricity and the sale of computation - the entire chain, from both ends.

Three new names join the board, among them Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert and Redwood Materials founder JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla's board. Straubel personally invested in Crusoe back in 2021.

In the whole published list of investors and clients there is not a single European name. The capital comes from America and the Gulf, the plants are in Texas, and the decision about where the next transport module stops is made by a firm that answers to no European regulator. When infrastructure becomes mobile, the question is no longer who builds it - but who even has the right to say where it may plug in.