In 2024, Crusoe went from harnessing oilfield flare gas to mine bitcoin to going all in on the first phase an AI data center so big it needed a codename that sounded like an inside joke: Project Ludicrous, OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate partnership in Abilene, Texas. Investors—who have shoved more than $4 billion into the company and valued it at $10 billion last fall—applauded the audacity: build data centers bigger and faster than ever before. Now, Crusoe is going small. In 2024, Crusoe went from harnessing oilfield flare gas to mine bitcoin to going all in on the first phase an AI data center so big it needed a codename that sounded like an inside joke: Project Ludicrous, OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate partnership in Abilene, Texas. Investors—who have shoved more than $4 billion into the company and valued it at $10 billion last fall—applauded the audacity: build data centers bigger and faster than ever before. Now, Crusoe is going small. Crusoe is using $200 million of that funding in the next year to expand its investment in smaller, prepackaged, modular data centers, it told Forbes. That includes unveiling a new 350,000 square foot factory in Brighton, Colorado to make its modular units, branded Crusoe Spark. Unlike the Abilene partnership, where buildings drawing more than 100 megawatts each are stitched together to form a massive 1.2 GW data center, Crusoe Spark units are about one megawatt each and a little larger than a shipping container. That makes them more suitable for inference, the unglamorous, revenue-adjacent work of actually running models like the one behind ChatGPT. Crusoe says it hopes to crank out 100 modular data centers per year, with the first ones due this summer. In other words: Crusoe isn’t abandoning hyperscale. It’s buying itself a faster, steadier way to add capacity—and get paid. “We’re going to go big on Spark, but we’re still in for the big hyperscale units” says Crusoe’s cofounder Cully Cavness. “I want to be clear that we’ll do both. It's a barbell strategy, but this is now saying, ‘okay, five production lines, 200 employees, 350,000 square foot factory, a couple hundred million dollars,’ Spark is going to be a real product offering.” Crusoe sees its Spark units as addressing the next phase of AI infrastructure: not just massive training campuses like its Stargate Abilene data center, but smaller distributed, modular data centers that can be loaded onto semitrucks and then stacked together like Legos, Cavness said. Modularity means that Crusoe can deploy data center capacity in chunks, on schedule, instead of betting on a single massive build that can hit repeated “unexpected” delays because the grid can’t, the crews can’t, or the locals won’t. For now, all of the capacity from Crusoe’s Spark units gets sold to customers—including AI startup Decart, which uses it to power AI video generation—through the company’s cloud offering. Use cases could be companies that are prioritizing speed and want to put their AI data centers near their customers for faster response times, or enterprises like hospitals that need to run their AI systems onsite, in a private data center because of security requirements, Cavness said. Crusoe is also hoping to deploy Spark units on-site and sell that compute through a new product offering called Edge Zones, though it hasn’t done so yet. Crusoe’s announcement comes days after Bloomberg and The Information reported that Oracle opted not to expand its partnership beyond the initial 1.2 gigawatt Stargate data center Crusoe is building in Texas.  Cavness told Forbes the reports were “much ado about nothing,” and said that Crusoe and Oracle were moving forward with the initial eight data centers in Abilene as planned and noted that Crusoe had never announced an expansion with Oracle. “There was a lot of speculation and people kind of making up explanations…a lot of these reports are not really based in fact,” he said. Read the full story on Forbes: By Anna Tong https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/12/from-gigawatts-to-grab-and-go-crusoe-leans-into-modular-ai-data-centers/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices