From flared gas to AI factories: Crusoe's race for cheap energy

Key points

Key takeaways from 20VC interview with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller (October 2026):

Think like a mountaineer. An Everest climber, Lochmiller has made mountaineering a core Crusoe value: plan for plan A, B, C and D, endure the hard stretches, and run a safety culture where “getting up to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory”.

Born from a blank slate. After Everest in 2018, with no plan lined up for the first time in his life, the MIT- and Los Alamos-trained physicist turned quant decided to attack AI's two bottlenecks: compute and energy.

Bitcoin first, AI always. Crusoe monetised waste energy with bitcoin mining, but an AI platform was the goal from day one; it launched in early 2022 with its first paying customers, and ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 was the moment resources shifted decisively to AI compute.

Distributed, not centralised. Serving a neural network is compute-bound, not network-bound, so AI workloads do not need to sit in Northern Virginia; Crusoe bets AI infrastructure goes where energy is low-cost and abundant — the same logic that cut bitcoin-mining data-centre costs by ~98%.

Data centres, GPUs, tokens. Crusoe sells at three layers, with the GPU the most valuable thing in the data centre; vertical integration lets it dodge supply-chain bottlenecks, such as building medium-voltage power distribution centres in-house in 28 weeks versus a 100-week vendor lead time.

Speed as a moat. The first two Abilene buildings (over 200MW) went up in a year against a 2.5-year best bid among 34 rival developers — because where GPUs can be plugged in is now the binding constraint on AI.

Backers doubled down. The Series F raised $3.9B at a $30.9B valuation in September 2026, with long-standing backers including Founders Fund and Nvidia across earlier rounds.

Read more: 20VC (YouTube)