TECHNOLOGY
Crusoe Energy ‘significantly expansed’ cloud business
Crusoe Energy Systems (Crusoe), a solutions provider for the energy industry, has significantly expanded its cloud business.
Equipped with new capacity online and additional financing earmarked for further GPU purchases, Crusoe’s latest move marks an important milestone in the next phase of its mission to reduce the environmental impact of computing and provide customers with a reliable, sustainable, and cost-effective solution for AI workloads. This is a key moment for Crusoe as it works to make clean computing solutions available at scale in the burgeoning artificial intelligence space.
The new capacity includes NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs delivering an order-of-magnitude leap in performance to power AI, as well as additional NVIDIA A100 TensorCore GPUs, connected with high-speed NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, supporting market leading levels of reliability and performance. Crusoe Cloud’s new capacity is coming online at a time when the entire compute infrastructure market is constrained due to burgeoning demand from AI/ML workloads, and Crusoe is excited to support this fast-growing market.
Furthermore, to support continuous growth and additional capacity availability in the coming months, Crusoe is announcing a commitment from investment firm Upper90 for asset-backed financing for the purposes of securing additional GPUs. Crusoe previously closed a $350 million Series C equity offering in 2022. The Series C was led by climate technology venture capital firm G2 Venture Partners (G2VP), in line with the fund’s mandate to scale technologies that economically decarbonise large existing industries. The most recent debt financing from Upper90 will allow Crusoe to continue rapid investment in the infrastructure needed to scale its AI cloud offering. The additional GPU capacity is expected to be available to customers in Q1 of 2024.
With this next phase of Crusoe Cloud’s growth, Crusoe continues to advance the future of climate-aligned computing by expanding capabilities and access to a broader market, including major enterprise customers.
Highlights
- Additional NVIDIA H100SXM and A100SXM capacity availability for high-performance workloads
- NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking between select H100SXM and A100SXM clusters for ML training workloads
- Crusoe will soon provide NVIDIA L40S GPUs for generative AI, inference, graphics, and scientific computing workloads
- Crusoe has secured an initial commitment of $200 million for the purchase of GPUs from Upper90 for the continued scaling of Crusoe Cloud
- Crusoe Cloud’s new capacity is powered by 100% carbon free energy
Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe’s CEO and co-founder, said: “Crusoe has been a pioneer in building innovative infrastructure that utilises stranded, wasted, or clean energy to power the compute resources we need to drive our shared progress and reduce its environmental impact.
“Crusoe Cloud is a highly reliable and innovative computing platform that we built from the ground up. From its the specially-designed platform, the infrastructure that serves it, to the energy that powers it, Crusoe Cloud is transforming climate-aligned computing for innovators everywhere.”
Upper90 co-founder and CEO, Billy Libby, said: “Upper90 is thrilled to expand our partnership with Crusoe which started in 2019 with equipment financing as they scale their innovative AI product offering that combines high-performance computing infrastructure with a positive environmental impact.
“As a firm that provides tailored debt solutions to technology companies with predictable revenue or collateral, Crusoe is a great example of businesses we’re looking to back.”
High-performance computing workloads, such as large language model (LLM) training, inference, and generative AI require massive amounts of computing and energy resources to operate. Crusoe’s cloud offering mitigates the negative environmental impacts of these workloads by utilising geographically wasted, stranded, or clean energy to power its climate-aligned, low-cost solutions for compute intensive applications.
To-date, Crusoe’s utilisation of otherwise wasted flared gas has reduced flaring by billions of cubic feet and in 2022 prevented methane emissions equivalent to removing approximately 170,000 gasoline-powered cars from the road.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
