Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller discusses the AI infrastructure company's nearly $4 billion in fresh funding sending its valuation to ...
What Chase Lochmiller said
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Chase Lochmiller, CEO of Crusoe, discussed the company's recent funding round and its vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform, which spans data centers, managed compute clusters, and managed AI services. He detailed the varying contract durations across these segments, from 15-20 year data center commitments to shorter-term managed services. Lochmiller addressed the addition of three board members, J.B. Straubel, Bill Stein, and Thomas Seifert, and hinted at a potential future IPO, though he emphasized it's under constant evaluation. He pushed back on negative perceptions of data centers, calling it a 'marketing issue,' and highlighted Crusoe's water-efficient designs and economic benefits to communities like Abilene, Texas, where they contribute significantly to the tax base. He acknowledged no projects have been delayed by local opposition yet but noted the issue is unfolding in real time.
Key takeaways
Crusoe's data center contracts typically span 15-20 years with investment-grade tech companies.
Crusoe's Abilene, Texas buildings use roughly the same water footprint as 10 single-family homes each.
Crusoe will account for about a third of the total tax base in Abilene and Taylor County.
Crusoe is increasing tax revenue by over 100% in Armstrong County, Texas.
Lochmiller said entering the public market 'probably does make sense' at some point, but is constantly evaluating.
Numbers and commitments
Figure
What it refers to
Type
At
10 single family homes
Water footprint of each big building in Abilene, Texas
2:08Chase, with those kind of three buckets you just outlined, what's the kind of percentage of sales for each currently, and how is Crusoe's business kind of shifting in terms of the mainstay of what you do?
5:11Chase, I respect that Crusoe's business is not just in The United States. Right?
7:54But, Chase, on there's no specific projects that have been delayed or impacted or paused because of local policy or opposition?
CEO, Chase Lochmiller, back with us on Bloomberg Tech. This round has been in the works a while. It's a big round, a vote of confidence, and I think the participants are super interesting as well, Chase. Let's talk about the capital need. You know, what it is you're gonna be able to get going on now.
Absolutely. So, you know, thanks for having me on the show, first of all, Ed. Always great to see you. You know, this round was an exciting moment and the culmination of just an incredible amount of hard work, for many years across, you know, the Crusoe team. And, you know, it's really been an onus on the company and the whole industry to really dig deep, and really work hard to, you know, deliver the infrastructure layer of intelligence. Right. You know, the capital needs are really tremendous for what's happening. And because of that, and the value creation potential is really enormous in terms of, you know, what AI is gonna do to transform the global economy, and that's really why the capital is being driven to the sector.
Chase, people are familiar with Crusoe. I mean, probably because of the relationship with Oracle, the relationship with OpenAI. But if we really scale it back to simple terms, you help build data centers, and you also have your own cloud computing platform now. Could you just explain that split?
Yeah. So Crusoe is a vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform that, you know, helps manage infrastructure from the electron to the token. So this is both building, operating, and energizing these large scale AI factories and then building software to operate these AI factories, which is the Crusoe cloud platform. So, you know, you really think about what we deliver to our customers can be a data center in the case of, you know, how we've worked with Oracle and Microsoft and a number of other big customers. It can be a managed compute cluster, which is what we're doing with folks like Perplexity and Figure and a number of other key AI innovators. And it can also be managed services and managed intelligence, which is what we're doing with delivering our AccruSil managed inference platform and some of our other services like serverless fine tuning.
Chase, with those kind of three buckets you just outlined, what's the kind of percentage of sales for each currently, and how is Crusoe's business kind of shifting in terms of the mainstay of what you do?
Well, you know, each of those different businesses, each of those different ways of sort of serving customers, they typically have different durations. So when folks are making data center commitments to us, we're typically working with very large tech companies that have investment grade credit ratings, and they're typically committing to us, you know, for somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. They're multi decade long commitments. You know, when you think about the life cycle of a GPU and the managed compute clusters, those can range anywhere from, you know, a few months to, you know, five to six years, but they typically don't go beyond that just because that's sort of the life cycle of the chips. And then when you think about managed inference and managed AI services, those are more, you know, they're developer tools or it's building in the developer ecosystem. So they're more on demand. You know, there are commitments that folks are making, but they're typically shorter term in nature, as they're scaling their AI applications and the actual utilization of these services. So, you know, it sort of offers a broad spectrum of services that we can offer the industry, as well as a broad spectrum of contracts and revenues resources that we're receiving, as a business.
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Lochmiller, C. (2026, September 18). Crusoe CEO: Data Center Indusry Has a 'Marketing Issue’ [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Tech. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2043516/
MLA
Chase Lochmiller. "Crusoe CEO: Data Center Indusry Has a 'Marketing Issue’." Bloomberg Tech, 18 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2043516/.
BibTeX
@misc{lochmiller2026_2043516,
author = {Chase Lochmiller},
title = {Crusoe CEO: Data Center Indusry Has a 'Marketing Issue’},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Tech. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2043516/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
