Crusoe made its name building one of the biggest artificial-intelligence supercomputers on earth. The firm's next big bet is going small.

After spending the past two years building a data-center complex in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, Crusoe is now investing heavily in smaller data centers, which it can manufacture in its own factories, load onto flatbed trucks, and deploy wherever it can find available power. The idea is that this will be faster and cheaper than solely relying on large construction projects, which are getting more expensive and facing delays across the country.

Fueling the strategy is a fresh $3.9 billion funding round that values Crusoe at about $30.9 billion after the investment. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Investment, Crusoe Chief Executive Chase Lochmiller said. Other investors include Founders Fund, TPG and several sovereign-wealth funds, including the Qatar Investment Authority.

Crusoe's move reflects a change in how AI companies want to access computing capacity. Giant clusters containing hundreds of thousands of chips have proved useful for training the most sophisticated models. But serving those same models to users, a process known as inference, can often be done with considerably smaller amounts of chips, Lochmiller said.

"You don't actually need an Abilene to do that," Lochmiller said. Running inference from such a facility, he said, "can be a bit of overkill."

The smaller data centers, which Crusoe calls Spark, offer the firm another advantage: speed. Building new data centers requires months of planning, construction and coordination with local communities.

Crusoe can manufacture the Spark data centers in its own facilities, then ship them to sites with available power-all without the need to send hundreds of workers to a construction site. That approach could become increasingly useful as access to labor and electricity becomes one of the biggest constraints on development.

Founded in 2018, Crusoe's first business involved putting computing equipment near oil-and-gas sites, where it could tap excess energy. The company initially catered heavily to cryptocurrency miners before the AI boom redirected its attention toward computing using Nvidia's GPU processors.

The Abilene project vaulted Crusoe from a relatively obscure energy startup into a central player in the AI data-center world. Crusoe initially developed eight buildings there for Oracle, which rents the computing capacity to OpenAI.

Crusoe had expected to expand the site with Oracle and OpenAI, but after the firms signed deals with other developers, Crusoe ended up leasing the additional buildings to Microsoft instead. The campus has roughly 2.1 gigawatts of planned power capacity, according to Lochmiller, including a 900-megawatt gas plant on-site to power Microsoft's portion of the project.

Crusoe is unusual among AI infrastructure startups because it isn't betting on a single way to make money. Many newer AI cloud providers, often referred to as neoclouds, are known primarily for buying expensive chips and renting access to them.

Crusoe makes money at several layers: developing and leasing data centers, renting out the GPUs inside them, or running AI models for customers and charging for the computing output, known as tokens.

"We sell data centers, GPUs and tokens," Lochmiller said.

This strategy has at times ruffled the board of directors, who have suggested the company narrow its focus, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. Lochmiller, however, said he believes his strategy helps the firm build better data centers, because it has a firsthand look at how demand is evolving.

Crusoe's cloud customers include AI startup Perplexity, Lochmiller said.

Its business running models for customers, which the company calls "managed inference," is starting to reach meaningful scale. Lochmiller said the business went from virtually no revenue at the start of 2026 to an annual revenue run rate of more than $100 million by the summer.

Crusoe expects a majority of its cloud inference computing to run out of the smaller data centers it is manufacturing. The firm has a manufacturing facility outside of Denver that will eventually be capable of producing as much as one gigawatt of Spark capacity annually, Lochmiller said. Spark units are already operating in Reno, Nev., powered by old electric car batteries and solar panels.

"We're going to put them everywhere," Lochmiller said.

The push into smaller facilities doesn't mean Crusoe is pulling back from the bigger ones. Crusoe is working on a project in Armstrong County, Texas, with Google, according to people familiar with the project, and has two other data-center developments in Texas and one in Missouri.

Lochmiller said the firm now has more than six gigawatts of data-center capacity under contract.

Crusoe, like other data-center firms, has done work to try to quell the growing backlash to AI data centers. It estimates it contributed roughly $20 million last year to the Abilene economy, through daily meals for construction workers, and expects that its annual tax contributions to the local school district will exceed the school's current annual budget. And in Warrenton, Mo., where the firm has a project under development, it decided to cover admission for spectators at football games this season.