Bitcoin miner Crusoe to build ‘multibillion-dollar’ AI data center in Texas

Bitcoin mining company Crusoe Energy announced a new multibillion-dollar deal with energy technology company Lancium to build a data center for artificial intelligence in Texas.

Crusoe Energy, one of the first Bitcoin (BTC) mining companies in the U.S. to use waste natural gas to power its operations, announced a “multi-billion dollar” deal with Lancium on Thursday morning to build a 200-megawatt data center for artificial intelligence (AI) in Texas.

Crusoe said in a press release that the construction is just the “first phase” of the data center development, which will expand to enable AI workloads “at scale with 1.2 GW of power capacity” at the Lancium Clean Campus. The bitcoin miner says that once complete, each data center building will be able to run “up to 100,000 GPUs in a single integrated network fabric,” significantly increasing the scale for AI training and inference workloads.

Both companies designed the data center to enable “the world’s largest GPU clusters” in an effort to accelerate breakthroughs in the artificial intelligence sector, Crusoe co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller said.

“Working with Lancium in Abilene, given its leadership in renewable energy and its plans for the facility, presents a unique opportunity to sustainably power the future of AI, and we are excited to have the city’s support in this ambitious effort,” Lochmiller added. The Lancium data center is projected to be powered in 2025, but the exact timeframe remains unclear.

Founded in 2018 by Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, Crusoe focuses on using otherwise wasted natural gas to power its Bitcoin mining operations. The company closed a $350 million Series C funding round led by G2 Venture Partners in April 2022, with other firms including Polychain Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Founders Fund, and Winklevoss Capital.