Energy first, then compute. @ChaseLochmiller, co-founder and CEO of @CrusoeAI is building a lot of the data centers that power the age of intelligence. They just closed a round at a $31B valuation, about 8 years into a company that started as two guys burning flared gas in the Bakken oil field to mine Bitcoin. That wasn’t a pivot, btw. Chase was AI-pilled early. The bet was: if data and compute are the bottleneck, compute becomes an energy problem. So instead of bringing stranded energy to a market, bring the market to the energy. Bitcoin was the easiest way to turn electrons into money while he waited for AI demand to show up. It showed up on November 30th, 2022. He’s a learning machine. On track to be a professor, then a quant, then Everest, now running a 2,000+ person vertically integrated business with welders and AI researchers in the same company. A few things we get into: •Why Crusoe is an AI supermajor: upstream (power), midstream (data centers), downstream (AI cloud). Exxon famously doesn’t hedge oil because the stack hedges itself. Margins move around the stack; own the whole thing.

 •“Most startups die from suicide, not homicide.” We said the exact same thing at HubSpot. If someone else is chasing your opportunity, that’s a compliment.

 •Coopetition. He’ll partner with companies he competes with elsewhere.  Useful when you’re building infrastructure the entire industry needs.

 •The CEO journey isn’t linear. “As soon as I’m sick of hearing myself say something, we’re just scratching the surface.”

 •How he scales himself: a domain expert owns each vertical. Energy, data centers, manufacturing, AI cloud. He goes deep enough to get aligned on direction and understand how it connects to the rest of the business. Then he holds them accountable to execute. Alignment first, then trust with accountability.

 •Should every CEO hire a coach? Yes. His coach was as much therapist as coach, and it was critical for him and the company. We get into that more. •People scale linearly, companies scale exponentially (h/t First Round). When you start thinking about letting someone go, that was probably the right time.

 •Actively hunt bad news. Good news is nice, but the CEO’s job is to “run into the burning buildings,” find what’s broken, and fix it.

 •Selling the Bitcoin business to NYDIG while it was making money. One word: focus. •The data center backlash. “The industry has a marketing problem. The truth is on our side.”
 Timestamps: 0:00 – Cold open 1:10 – Intro 1:35 – Professor, quant, Everest, energy, data centers: is there a throughline? 2:43 – What people get wrong about the CEO journey 3:53 – Live on the infinite growth loop 4:44 – “My biz is becoming dizzyingly complex beneath me” 6:44 – Scaling yourself with domain experts 7:36 – Trust, DRIs, and not being hands off 8:33 – Cross-org execution and the weekly staff meeting 10:11 – “As soon as I’m sick of hearing myself say it” 11:37 – Keeping urgency at 2,000 employees; the Elon tension 13:12 – Books, mentors, and a coach 15:12 – Most startups die from suicide, not homicide 16:50 – Paranoia and coopetition 17:26 – The AI supermajor: upstream, midstream, downstream 19:47 – Propeller, Blue Energy, and energy first 23:24 – Flared gas, Bitcoin, and bringing the market to the energy 24:45 – Wait But Why, Andrew Ng, and compute as an energy problem 28:52 – November 30, 2022 30:19 – Selling the Bitcoin business: focus 32:43 – Polish is learned: public speaking and Shane Metcalfe 34:31 – Should every CEO hire a coach? Yes. 37:54 – Hire slow, fire fast, and reading the mosaic 41:09 – Ali Ghodsi vs. Dev Ittycheria on exec turnover 42:51 – AI researchers and welders: the collective genius 44:15 – The data center backlash and the marketing problem 48:53 – Thick skin and speaking truth to power 51:09 – Everest: the 2014 avalanche and the Khumbu Icefall 55:12 – The Balcony and the summit 57:36 – My takeaways

Neoclouds can't just lease GPUs. They need to own the full agent inference platform: open-weight models (SGLang), fine-tuned models (Miles, River), and secure sandboxes (SPACE). We look forward to working with Coreweave, Akamai, Crusoe, and more partners.

Crusoe was founded on a simple idea: bring compute where energy already exists, not the other way around. Our "across the meter" model turns stranded wind and solar power into AI compute, and gives back to the grid when it can. 🔗

Why the AI infrastructure market is just like the energy market “There are very interesting parallels between AI infrastructure and the energy market. There are a lot of different ways to make money across the value chain. What Crusoe is focused on doing is building an AI super major, vertically integrated across upstream, midstream and downstream. Where the margin accrues is going to move around. We are seeing a similar phenomenon play out in AI, where our margins are going to move around across electrical data centers, chips and services.” @ChaseLochmiller Love to hear your thoughts @GavinSBaker @branninmcbee @stephenbalaban @Electron_Cowboy

Today, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry. Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to come. But its full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility. This is bigger than a single product. It's the beginning of an open ecosystem to build the trust layer for safe agent systems. Together, we are building the foundation of the AI economy. Trust and innovation are not in conflict. Safety is how trust is earned. We must build not only the most capable AI, but the most trusted AI, so that this extraordinary technology can realize its enormous promise for the world.

Crusoe has raised $3.9 billion in Series F, co-led by @Atreidesmgmt, @MubadalaCapital, and @valor Equity Partners. This capital will help us grow across our AI factories, from large-scale campuses to modular Crusoe Spark units, and continue to innovate with Crusoe Cloud. The full chain, from electrons to tokens:

Thanks again @GovStitt and @monroefortulsa for your thoughtful and inspiring words during the ribbon cutting ceremony at @CrusoeAI’s second factory in Tulsa. We are proud to employ 300 great Oklahomans and to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.A. as part of the AI buildout.