Robinhood Fund Takes Stake in Major Financing Round

Robinhood Ventures Fund I has committed approximately $25 million to Crusoe as part of the company’s $3.9 billion Series F financing round. The round closed on August 31 and assigned Crusoe a post-money valuation of $30.9 billion. The financing was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Additional participants included Nvidia, Founders Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, GIC, Radical Ventures and TPG.

The capital is intended to support existing data-center projects, including a large facility in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as the company’s modular, truck-transportable units known as Spark. Ten months earlier Crusoe had raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation, indicating rapid growth in investor interest.

From Flared Gas and Bitcoin Mining to AI Data Centers

Crusoe was founded in 2018 to convert flared natural gas from oil fields into electricity for modular data centers. Those facilities initially supported Bitcoin mining. By March 2025 the company had deployed more than 425 modular data centers across seven U.S. states and Argentina. That same year it sold its Bitcoin mining operations and its Digital Flare Mitigation subsidiary to NYDIG, completing a full strategic shift toward artificial-intelligence infrastructure.

Crusoe now reports a total contracted value exceeding $140 billion, with 6 gigawatts of gross contracted capacity and 1 gigawatt already operational. Its business model includes leasing data-center space to customers who supply their own GPUs, renting its own GPU capacity, and providing AI inference compute. Customers include Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. The company has also signed a roughly $13 billion, five-year agreement to supply GPUs and infrastructure to quantitative trading firm Jane Street.

Retail Investors Gain Access Through Closed-End Fund

Robinhood Ventures Fund I began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 6. The closed-end vehicle does not require accredited-investor status and allows purchases of fractional shares starting at $1. Its portfolio already includes OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks and Canva. In April the fund invested $75 million in OpenAI. The Crusoe stake extends that exposure one layer deeper into the physical infrastructure that supports large-scale AI models.

Alongside the financing, Crusoe added three new board members: Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert, Primary Digital Infrastructure partner and chief investment officer Bill Stein, and Redwood Materials founder and chief executive JB Straubel, who also serves on Tesla’s board.

Broader Market Repricing of Mining Infrastructure

Publicly traded mining companies that hold contracts for artificial intelligence or high-performance computing trade at an average of 12.9 times forward sales, according to CoinShares data, compared with 3.7 times for firms without such contracts. The sector carries an AI and high-performance-computing backlog valued above $100 billion, yet annualized revenue from those contracts currently totals only $1.1 billion.

Electricity demand remains a shared constraint. Gartner projects that global data-center electricity consumption will rise 26 percent to 565 terawatt-hours in 2026, with AI-optimized servers accounting for nearly one-third of the increase. Existing, already-permitted sites that once hosted Bitcoin mining equipment are therefore attracting higher valuations when they can be redirected to AI workloads.

Venture capital interest in crypto and blockchain has remained solid. Galaxy Research recorded $5.683 billion invested across 384 crypto and blockchain deals in the second quarter, a 31 percent increase from the prior quarter, with later-stage rounds driving much of the growth. The two sectors continue to compete for capital, power and physical locations, yet the economics of former mining infrastructure have shifted quickly as AI demand expands.