Welcome back. One of the key infrastructure providers for the AI boom just announced its valuation has more than tripled in less than a year. Private startup Crusoe, which helped build the new Stargate data center campus in Texas, is raising $1.4 billion in its latest funding round with investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Salesforce Ventures, and Nvidia. The company is now worth over $10 billion. And here at Post 9 for a CNBC exclusive is Crusoe's co-founder and CEO, Chase Lochmiller. Chase, welcome. Good to have you in.
Thanks. I'm excited to be here.
You've got a really, you've got a front row seat to what's going on in Abilene and Stargate and Oracle. Can you talk about how it's been relative to all the expectations and hype that it gets?
Um, yeah, so, you know, I think on the ground it's just a very busy construction site. You know, we have about 7,000 people on site every day that are working hard to bring this infrastructure for intelligence to life.
You do say you're a buyer of the abundance theory that this is all going to bring huge benefits to the globe, but that energy is a gating factor, right?
Absolutely. Crusoe's core mission is accelerating the abundance of energy and intelligence, and we view those two things going hand in hand to bring this AI abundant future to bear.
How do you think the energy question then is going to get solved? I mean, in time for these things to work.
Look, I think there's a tremendous amount of innovation taking place across the energy landscape. Um, you know, utilities were inherently kind of a sleepy industry for a while as the total demand for power in the US kind of flatlined for a period, but we're seeing tremendous demand to power this next generation of computing infrastructure to run these large-scale AI workloads. And, you know, with that is coming a tremendous amount of capital to inspire innovators across the energy ecosystem to bring to life new generation technologies and scale existing ones.
How would you characterize the availability of that capital? Obviously you just raised $1.4 billion at a valuation of $10 billion or more. Um, you know, some people say that there's essentially a bubble going on as it pertains to AI infrastructure. I've talked to others. I spoke with the Aries CEO a few weeks ago who said there's not enough capital to fund what we need right now. Where do you stand on that spectrum?
Um, I think the, I mean, I believe that the capital's there. We're seeing it firsthand because it's following the demand. I think what we're seeing is that you have companies with the greatest balance sheets in the history of business that are leveraging their balance sheet, leveraging their cash flows, leveraging their profitability to help stand up this infrastructure, and they're making long-term commitments. These aren't, you know, people aren't sort of just getting into it a little bit. It's like people are making long-term, you know, 15, 20-year commitments to bring this infrastructure to life, and that's really what's required. And from a credit perspective, I think, you know, you have this incredible offtake for long-term, I think, you know, the capital's absolutely there to help fund this buildup.
I mean, some of the pushback I guess comes in the form of, you know, these, the business as you have of kind of building the actual infrastructure and then being a platform for others to utilize, right? That's your cloud business, and whether the profitability is going to kind of be there at that layer. How fast you have to depreciate, you know, some of the technology that you install and whether that's just kind of a treadmill that you're going to have to run indefinitely.
Um, yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of different assets in this ecosystem ranging from power plants to data centers to chips. I think the most uncertain question is what is the right depreciation schedule for the chips, as, you know, new releases of new hardware platforms have accelerated. The way we view it is that, you know, there's certainly a lot of demand for the newest, latest, and greatest generations of chips to help train the next generation of frontier foundational models and, you know, scale inference workloads. However, we still are seeing tremendous demand for historical and legacy, you know, generations of chips. You know, Blackwell is sort of all the talk on the street right now with, you know, Nvidia releasing that platform recently, but we're still seeing tremendous demand for Hopper, the previous generation, and even Ampere, the generation before that.
IBM's on the tape today saying some of their quantum algos run on kind of conventional AMD chips.
