Section A · Origin & scale

The Company

Crusoe was founded in 2018 on an unusual thesis: stranded gas at oil wells could power compute. The company started in Bitcoin mining, pivoted hard to AI in 2022-2023, and now operates some of the most consequential AI-compute buildouts in the industry.

Founding (2018)

Crusoe Energy Systems was founded in 2018 by Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness. The Denver-based company began as an energy-and-compute play: the founders had spotted that oil and gas operators in places like the Permian Basin were flaring (burning off) natural gas because it wasn't economic to pipe it to market.

The proposition was simple: take the flare gas, run it through a generator on-site, and use the electricity to power computing equipment. The compute pays for itself (and the gas), the gas doesn't go to waste, and the carbon footprint is meaningfully better than letting the gas flare uncontrolled.

Original thesis

The three legs of the original thesis:

  1. Stranded energy is structurally cheaper than grid power. The energy producer values it at zero or negative; capturing it costs less than buying grid electricity.
  2. Computing demand is large and growing. Whatever demand sink — initially crypto mining; later AI compute — there's always a buyer for cheap GPU-hours.
  3. The combination creates a moat. Competitors paying grid prices can't match the energy cost basis. The advantage compounds over time as more sites come online.

This is fundamentally an energy-arbitrage thesis with compute as the demand sink. The choice of compute (Bitcoin in 2018-2022; AI in 2022 onward) was secondary to the energy story.

The crypto-to-AI pivot

Through 2018-2022, Crusoe's primary compute workload was Bitcoin mining. The economics worked: cheap flare-gas-powered electricity, ASIC-based mining hardware, steady Bitcoin block rewards.

In 2022 the pivot to AI began. Drivers:

  • Bitcoin's post-halving economics were tightening.
  • The Ethereum proof-of-stake transition (Sept 2022) eliminated a large GPU-mining demand sink.
  • ChatGPT's November 2022 launch made AI compute demand a credible long-term thesis.
  • GPU pricing was high but the time-to-payback math worked given the energy cost advantage.

By 2023, Crusoe was building AI-compute capacity aggressively. By 2024-2025, the company's narrative had fully transformed — Crusoe is described in press as an AI infrastructure company rather than an energy-arbitrage company. Bitcoin mining still exists at some scale but is no longer the strategic focus.

Founders

  • Chase Lochmiller — CEO. Background spanning investment management and energy. Drives the strategic narrative and commercial relationships.
  • Cully Cavness — President. Background in oil and gas. Drives the energy-side relationships and operational deployment.

The founder combination of energy and finance is well-matched to a business that's simultaneously building datacenters in oil patches and raising capital from sophisticated investors.

Funding history

Crusoe has raised substantial capital across multiple rounds:

  • Early rounds in 2019-2020 from energy-focused and tech-focused investors.
  • Several rounds during the 2021-2022 crypto cycle scaled the early business.
  • Major funding rounds in 2023-2024 supported the AI pivot and aggressive capacity buildouts.
  • Reported $600M+ Series D in 2024.
  • Total reported funding through 2025 exceeds $1B equity plus significant debt.

Investors include strategic energy companies, traditional VCs, and infrastructure-focused funds. The capital base is large enough to fund multi-hundred-MW buildouts.

Scale today

Crusoe's 2025-2026 scale signals:

  • Multi-hundred-MW operating datacenter capacity, with more under construction.
  • Tens of thousands of GPUs deployed and growing.
  • Major customer commitments tied to large-scale AI training (Stargate-adjacent deployments).
  • Gold-tier in SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 2.0 (one tier below CoreWeave's Platinum, on par with the strongest second-tier neoclouds).
  • Headcount in the hundreds.

The buildout pace through 2025-2026 has been one of the fastest in the industry. Crusoe is one of a small handful of companies operating at the scale needed to handle frontier model training.

Takeaway

Crusoe's strategic identity is energy-led. The compute side is the consumer of cheap power; the energy side is what makes the model differentiated. The next chapter unpacks the energy model in detail.