Crusoe: Powering the AI Buildout

Chase Lochmiller (Co-Founder & CEO, Crusoe) in conversation with Emma Norchet (Partner, T. Rowe Price) Lochmiller traces Crusoe's evolution from flare-gas-powered Bitcoin mining to a vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, covering land and power development, data center construction, GPU cluster deployment, and managed inference. The company is building gigawatt-scale campuses for OpenAI and Oracle under the Stargate initiative. The centerpiece is Crusoe's Abilene, Texas campus: 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity, equivalent to the city of Denver, financed as a $15 billion project with JP Morgan and Blue Owl. Crusoe won the original OpenAI contract against 32 competitors by delivering a 100-megawatt facility in 11 months versus a competing 2.5-year bid. Lochmiller argues that AI data centers sized for peak demand will eventually sell excess power back to the grid, even as U.S. data center electricity use is projected to triple by the end of the decade.