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........

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