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Energy is getting really scarce for AI, but there's one company that turned that problem into a super surprising advantage.
Crusoe is just eight years old, and it's now one of the most valuable private tech companies.
Here's the crux of the energy problem.
Our demand for AI is running way ahead of what our entire energy grid can deliver.
The densest cluster of AI data centers on Earth is in northern Virginia, about four gigawatts.
And AWS, Azure, and everyone else in the hyperscaler category is plugging in there, but it's already full.
If you wanted to add another 100 megawatts, the average wait time is seven whole years.
Crusoe proposed a better way, moving you off the grid waitlist entirely by finding hidden energy sources that nobody else can use.
The company was started in 2018 by two friends, Chase from Quant Trading and Cully from the energy sector.
Their first product used trapped energy from oil fields, where methane gas was being burned off into the air.
They rigged up shipping container-sized boxes with generators and computers to sit nearby, capture that methane gas, and use it to power Bitcoin mining.
Pretty solid business.
Turns out, AI training also has similar power needs.
So in 2024, Oracle put out an RFP for 100 megawatts of power for an unnamed customer.
This turned out to be OpenAI.
People lined up to bid and claimed they could cut seven years down to two.
Chase said he was the 35th person to get that call, nowhere near the top, but he said he could get them that power in just one year.
By building it in Abilene, Texas, using a similar idea.
West Texas is wind country, and decades of tax credits built up a lot of wind turbines out there.
But that same grid clog meant that about a fifth of Texas renewable power never made it into supply.
It's trapped.
So rather than move the power to the demand, Crusoe moved the demand to the power.
They won the bid and built a huge campus.
It's 90 acres, 4 million square feet, and they've had to add about a gigawatt of power from gas turbines, too, just to meet the speed requirements needed.
When complete, it'll draw about a third as much energy as the whole northern Virginia region in just one campus.
Crusoe raised last at a $10 billion valuation in October, and reportedly they're in talks to raise at $30 billion right now, with rumors of an IPO on the horizon.
We'll see if this trapped energy play can take them all the way.
Top private tech companies, part 9: Crusoe
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