Robinhood Investment Crusoe Boosts AI Infrastructure

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) invested roughly $25 million in Crusoe preferred stock as part of the company’s $3.9 billion Series F financing round that closed August 31, valuing Crusoe at $30.9 billion post-money. The round was co‑led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners and included additional participation from Nvidia, Founders Fund, GIC, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures and TPG. The investment gives retail investors fractional exposure to Crusoe through RVI, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 6 and allows purchases from as little as $1.

“Crusoe is building a unique, vertically-integrated AI infrastructure asset that uses new energy sources to run data centers,” said Sarah Pinto, president of RVI. Pinto framed the stake as an extension of the fund’s AI strategy after an earlier $75 million investment in OpenAI, positioning Crusoe “alongside” other holdings such as SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks and Canva.

Why Robinhood backed Crusoe

The investment underlines growing investor appetite for firms supplying the compute and energy infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence models. Crusoe, which began in 2018 converting flared natural gas into electricity for modular data centers used initially to mine Bitcoin, sold its mining assets and its Digital Flare Mitigation subsidiary to NYDIG in 2025 to focus entirely on AI infrastructure.

Co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller emphasised the strategic shift: “I expect AI to usher in an era of abundance, but only through controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens,” adding that Crusoe is “grateful to have investors who share that conviction.” The company now operates a three-pronged business model of leasing data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling compute power for AI inference.

Scale and commercial traction

• Deployments: more than 425 modular data centers across seven U.S. states and Argentina.
• Capacity and contracts: reported total contracted value exceeding $140 billion, 6 gigawatts of gross contracted capacity, with 1 gigawatt already delivered and operational.
• Customers: includes major cloud and tech firms such as Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.
• Commercial deals: a multi‑year supply agreement with Jane Street valued at roughly $13 billion over five years.

The Series F surge is a rapid re‑rating: Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation only ten months earlier. The fresh capital is earmarked for existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas—currently used by OpenAI—and for scaling truck‑transportable modular units the company calls Spark. Crusoe also added three new board members alongside the round: Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Primary Digital Infrastructure partner and CIO Bill Stein, and JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials.

Outlook

Investors are increasingly pricing infrastructure that can serve AI and high‑performance computing at a premium compared with legacy crypto‑mining assets. Industry data show publicly traded miners with confirmed AI/HPC agreements command higher forward sales multiples versus peers without such deals. For Crusoe, the challenge ahead will be converting a substantial contract backlog into recurring revenue and delivering on operational scale—while RVI’s near‑retail access lets everyday investors share in that bet on the power and data‑center layer beneath AI models.