Data center startup Crusoe has secured a cloud services agreement valued at approximately $13 billion with trading firm Jane Street Group, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal adds to a roster of contracts Crusoe has already signed with companies like Meta Platforms Inc. and Oracle to supply AI computing power.
Spanning five years, the agreement will deliver advanced AI chip clusters, known as GPUs, along with other infrastructure needed for AI training and inference through Crusoe's cloud platform, the sources said. Last week, reports suggested Crusoe was seeking a chip-backed loan, with guarantees tied to its business contract with Jane Street.
Jane Street stands as the most significant client Crusoe's cloud business has landed to date, according to the insiders, and the transaction has notably boosted investor interest in Crusoe's latest funding round. On Thursday, additional reports indicated Crusoe raised more than $3 billion in a new financing round, valuing the company at roughly $30 billion.
Crusoe declined to comment, while Jane Street did not respond to requests for comment.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe initially focused on capturing waste natural gas from oil and gas fields to power cryptocurrency mining. The company later pivoted into AI infrastructure, gaining recognition for developing large-scale data center projects, most notably the "Stargate" flagship initiative in Texas, a collaboration with OpenAI and Oracle.
In March of this year, Microsoft agreed to lease an expansion of Crusoe's Stargate project, which was originally developed for Oracle and OpenAI before both parties eventually exited the negotiations.
While Crusoe has primarily invested in physical data center construction, it also markets its own AI cloud computing services. As hedge funds and other large enterprises compete for AI computing capacity, GPU-as-a-service cloud offerings, known as "neoclouds," are rapidly gaining traction.
Jane Street had previously announced plans to allocate about $6 billion for services on CoreWeave's AI cloud platform, alongside an additional $1 billion equity investment in the publicly traded cloud provider. In April, reports indicated Jane Street was in talks to co-lead a funding round for Fluidstack, a Crusoe competitor valued at around $18 billion at the time.
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