Crusoe Energy Systems LLC, a startup building data centers for artificial intelligence workloads, today announced it raised $600 million in a Series D funding round to accelerate its deployment of physical infrastructure.

The funding round, which values the company at $2.8 billion, was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Nvidia Corp., Fidelity, Long Journey Ventures, Mubadala, Ribbit Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

Founded in 2018, Crusoe first launched a service to provide small, containerized data centers to oil wells in the U.S. by harnessing natural gas that would otherwise be burned and wasted. Initially, the company used the energy for bitcoin mining, an energy-intensive method for earning cryptocurrency. Later the company pivoted its resources towards AI and high-performance computing.

The company says it can offer cost-effective generative AI compute at scale using clean energy allowing it to deliver environmentally aligned AI infrastructure with its data centers.

In October, Crusoe launched a $3.4 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital Inc. and Primary Digital to construct a two-building data center facility in Abilene, Texas. Together buildings will comprise about 998,000 square feet and are planned to support over 1.2 gigawatts of energy. One gigawatt of power could provide enough energy for around 700,000 homes.

The company estimates the facility will have the capacity to house up to 100,000 graphical processing units, making it one of the biggest purpose-built AI data centers in the world. “We’ve designed this data center to enable the largest clusters of GPUs in the world that will drive breakthroughs in AI,” said Crusoe co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Chase Lochmiller.

In addition to the fundraise, Crusoe also announced the general availability of Crusoe Cloud, a high-performance cloud platform designed for AI and machine learning workloads. Using the service, developers, data scientists and AI engineers can experiment with AI, train and deploy models.

In the past year, the company said it expanded collaborations with leading technology companies including Nvidia, VAST Data Inc., Deloitte and Rescale Inc. Crusoe now operates in nine U.S. states and three countries, including Iceland, serving customers globally.

With the new funding, the company said it plans to build more data centers that will use abundant, low-cost clean energy and has over 15 gigawatts in development.

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