The Zhitong Finance App learned that Chase Lochmiller, CEO of data center developer and AI computing power provider Crusoe, said at the Dallas Bloomberg Investment Conference on Tuesday that the recent sell-off of so-called “new cloud service providers” (neoclouds) has been “exaggerated” and that competitor CoreWeave (CRWV.US) has reached “some very good deals.” Crusoe has contracts with companies such as Meta Platforms, Oracle, and Alphabet's Google.
“I'm pretty adamant that a lot of anxiety is exaggerated and a bit overreacted,” Lochmiller said. “I know CoreWeave made some really good deals and they're in a pretty good position.”
AI computing power provider Coreweave is at the center of growing market concerns about the resilience of the AI infrastructure boom and hundreds of billions of dollars in loan financing. This month, its bonds plummeted to difficult levels, and the company's stock price has plummeted by more than 30%.
Crusoe was founded in 2018 and is best known for developing large-scale data center projects, including the flagship site of OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate project in Texas. However, the company is also selling AI cloud computing capabilities, joining the ranks of emerging NeoCloud such as CoreWeave to meet the surging AI demand of large enterprises. Last month, Crusoe raised more than $3 billion in a round of financing, with a valuation of around $30 billion. The company has attracted well-known investors such as Nvidia and Salesforce.
However, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that even though Crusoe raised a large amount of capital, the up-and-coming company is still being questioned by some tech companies for its ability to obtain and maintain large-scale, resource-intensive data centers online. Earlier this year, Crusoe experienced another setback in Abilene, Texas: Oracle and OpenAI decided not to lease additional capacity to Crusoe, but Microsoft later took over the space. Lochmiller said Crusoe is still seeing “endless demand,” and that demand is “deep and broad.”