Zhitong Finance App learned that according to people familiar with the matter, data center startup Crusoe has signed a cloud service agreement worth about 13 billion US dollars with trading agency Jane Street Group. Crusoe has previously signed contracts with companies such as Meta Platforms Inc. (META.US) and Oracle (ORCL.US) to provide them with AI computing power support.
People familiar with the matter said that the agreement will last for five years and will provide Jane Street with advanced AI chip clusters (i.e. GPUs) and other infrastructure needed for AI training and inference through Crusoe's cloud platform.
Last week, it was reported that Crusoe was seeking a chip loan, and the guarantee behind it was a related business contract from Jane Street.
People familiar with the matter said that Jane Street is the most powerful customer that Crusoe's cloud business has signed so far, and the deal has also significantly boosted investors' interest in Crusoe's latest funding round. There were also reports on Thursday that Crusoe raised more than 3 billion US dollars in the new round of financing, with a valuation of about 30 billion US dollars.
Crusoe did not comment, and Jane Street did not respond to requests for comment.
Crusoe was founded in 2018 and initially focused on capturing waste gas from oil and gas fields to power cryptocurrency mining. Since then, the company has transitioned into the AI infrastructure circuit and gained fame for developing large-scale data center projects, the most representative of which is the “Stargate” (Stargate) flagship project in Texas, where OpenAI collaborated with Oracle. In March of this year, Microsoft (MSFT.US) agreed to lease an expansion part of Crusoe's “Stargate” project — the expansion was initially developed for Oracle and OpenAI, but the latter two eventually withdrew from related negotiations.
Although Crusoe previously mainly invested in physical data center construction, the company itself is also selling AI cloud computing services. As large enterprises such as hedge funds compete for AI computing power, GPU-as-a-Service (GPU-as-a-Service) cloud businesses — so-called “neoclouds” (neoclouds) — are rapidly rising.
Jane Street previously announced that it plans to invest about $6 billion into the AI cloud platform of the new cloud service provider CoreWeave (CRWV.US) for procurement services, and inject an additional $1 billion into the listed cloud service provider in the form of equity investment.
In April, it was reported that Jane Street was in talks to co-lead a round of financing for Crusoe's competitor Fluidstack, which was valued at about $18 billion at the time.