TheChek News Flow

The Takeaway

Crusoe, a startup developing a large data center in Texas for Oracle and OpenAI, is arranging an employee share sale that values the seven-year-old firm at around $13 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction.

The deal involves selling around $120 million worth of employee shares and would value them at a 30% premium to an equity funding round Crusoe announced just weeks ago, these people said. It’s the latest example of a data center–related firm whose revenues and share price have gotten a boost from the relentless demand for servers by a handful of large spenders, including OpenAI.

The tender offer values Crusoe at about five and a half times its projected revenue next year. Crusoe this summer projected it would generate roughly $2.3 billion in revenue next year and about $5 billion in 2027, according to the person with knowledge of its finances. It projected roughly $540 million in 2025 revenue, about double the revenue it generated last year.

The forward revenue multiple is relatively low compared to valuations of AI cloud or application providers, which may reflect Crusoe’s high costs for developing data centers. Investors typically value data center operators on their earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, but Crusoe is operating at a loss. Its valuation was just $3 billion less than a year ago.

Crusoe also has ambitions of generating tens of billions of dollars of revenue annually from renting out AI cloud servers the way CoreWeave, Google and Microsoft do. Crusoe and CoreWeave both started as cloud providers to cryptocurrency miners.

The employee share sale is expected to be finalized within the next week, one of the people said. It isn’t clear if the firm’s two founders are selling any shares, and the terms could change. In most of these transactions, which are growing in popularity as initial public offerings remain rare, employees are capped at selling between 10% to 20% of their total vested stock.

It isn’t clear how much Crusoe is allowing its more than 1,000 employees to sell, or if former employees can participate in the transaction. A spokesperson for Crusoe did not have a comment.

The Crusoe share sale involves around 1% of the company’s total stock, meaning it’s many times smaller in percentage terms than a tender offer CoreWeave completed in 2023. And CoreWeave’s founders sold nearly $500 million of shares in 2023 and 2024. CoreWeave went public earlier this year and now sports a market capitalization of nearly $60 billion, almost nine times higher than its private valuation during that 2023 tender offer.

Employees at OpenAI, meanwhile, have sold around $10 billion worth of stock to private investors in the past four years.

The OpenAI Effect

Crusoe projected about $47 billion in capital expenditures through 2030 for its cloud business.

OpenAI’s announcement that it planned to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade to rent cloud servers from CoreWeave, Oracle, Google, Microsoft and Amazon has boosted all their stocks. OpenAI also is developing its own data centers, and the plans for those facilities boosted the stocks of chip suppliers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

After pivoting from powering bitcoin miners to renting out servers to AI developers, Crusoe in 2024 inked a deal with Oracle to build a data center for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas. OpenAI branded the Abilene site as part of its Stargate data center initiative to spur its AI development. Crusoe is trying to construct a data center in Abilene by 2028 that will be the size of San Francisco International Airport.

Crusoe is both a cloud provider and a data center developer. This year, those two business units are roughly the same size. In the future, Crusoe sees its cloud business contributing the majority of revenue. Crusoe projects that in 2027 it will generate about $1.6 billion in revenue from developing data centers and $3.4 billion in cloud revenue.

Crusoe investors could be in for a bumpy ride. The company expects to burn billions of dollars for its cloud business, according to documents viewed by The Information. It forecasts about $47 billion in capital expenditures through 2030 for its cloud business, which will involve taking on billions of dollars in debt.

Crusoe expects to generate $260 million in cloud revenue this year—up from about $100 million last year—and roughly $1.3 billion next year. It has told investors that owning its own power, manufacturing and data center facilities will help it offer lower cloud server prices than competitors in the future.

Crusoe also generates revenue from its digital infrastructure business, where it develops projects, collects lease payments and receives fees during the construction process. Crusoe expects to generate roughly $230 million in revenue this year from this line of business and about $1 billion next year.