Data center developer and AI compute provider Crusoe's chief executive, Chase Lochmiller, said on Tuesday at Bloomberg's investment conference in Dallas that the recent selloff in so-called "neoclouds" has been "overblown," and noted that competitor CoreWeave, Inc. (ASX: CRWV) has struck "some very good deals." Crusoe holds contracts with companies including Meta Platforms, Oracle, and Alphabet's Google.
"I'm fairly firm in my view that a lot of the anxiety has been exaggerated and is somewhat of an overreaction," Lochmiller said. "I know CoreWeave, Inc. (ASX: CRWV) has made some very good deals, and their position is fairly strong."
AI compute provider CoreWeave, Inc. (ASX: CRWV) is at the center of mounting market concerns over the resilience of the AI infrastructure boom and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt financing. This month, its bonds plunged to distressed levels, and its share price has fallen more than 30%.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe is best known for developing large-scale data center projects, including the flagship Stargate site in Texas for OpenAI and Oracle. But the company also sells AI cloud computing capacity, joining emerging neocloud players like CoreWeave, Inc. (ASX: CRWV) to meet surging AI demand from large enterprises. Last month, Crusoe raised more than $3 billion in a funding round at a valuation of about $30 billion. The company has attracted prominent investors including Nvidia and Salesforce.
However, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that despite Crusoe's substantial fundraising, the upstart has still faced skepticism from some tech companies over its ability to acquire and keep large-scale, resource-intensive data centers online. Earlier this year, Crusoe suffered another setback in Abilene, Texas: Oracle and OpenAI decided not to lease additional capacity from Crusoe, though the space was later taken over by Microsoft.
Lochmiller said Crusoe still sees "overwhelming demand," and that demand is "both deep and broad."
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