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Crusoe, the AI infrastructure firm behind Oracle's giant Abilene, Texas campus, has closed a $3.9 billion funding round led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala, pushing its valuation to roughly $30.9 billion. The company is using the capital to expand into smaller, factory-built facilities called Spark, designed for AI inference rather than massive training clusters.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing smaller data center deals in the 20-30 megawatt range, according to sources familiar with the discussions, even as both companies have already signed massive multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt infrastructure agreements. Anthropic has explored such deals in the UK and Nordics, while OpenAI has looked at similar opportunities in the Nordics, with talks also reportedly underway for smaller U.S. deployments. OpenAI confirmed it is building a 'diversified compute portfolio' but declined to discuss specific commercial talks; Anthropic did not comment.
Crusoe, the data center developer behind OpenAI's Abilene, Texas site, closed a $3.9 billion Series F funding round led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $30.9 billion. The funds will support both large-scale data center builds and Crusoe's new modular 'Spark' AI factories, which can be manufactured off-site and deployed quickly. The company also added three board members, including Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel and Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates data centers was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes in March. The damage wiped out data across all three availability zones in Bahrain and one of three zones in the UAE, with AWS saying the destruction exceeded what its systems were built to survive. Amazon had already halted billing in the affected regions and spent six months trying to restore services before disclosing the losses.
Amazon Web Services disclosed on September 15 that drone strikes attributed to Iran destroyed data center infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain so severely that customer data and resources could not be recovered. AWS said the damage crossed multiple availability zones, exceeding the redundancy built into its regional and multi-zone systems, following earlier strikes in March and April that had already caused structural, power and fire-related damage.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul's administration released a Community Investment Framework advising local governments on negotiating with data center developers. The guide recommends towns demand roughly $1 million per megawatt of power demand in community investment, alongside plans covering long-term maintenance, site abandonment, and phased funding timelines.
Crusoe, the company behind construction of one of OpenAI's largest data center projects, has closed a $3.9 billion funding round valuing it at nearly $31 billion. The company is now expanding into factory-built, smaller-scale data centers alongside its large infrastructure work.
Al Gore, speaking with TechCrunch alongside Generation Investment Management's Lila Preston, argued that AI data centers' emissions are far smaller than critics claim, comparing them to landfill emissions and global air conditioning use. He said what worries him more are warnings emerging from within the AI industry itself.
Amazon received warrants to buy up to 1.69 million Generac shares at $200.93 each, potentially worth up to $8 billion, as part of a deal for Generac to supply backup power generators to Amazon's data centers. Generac shares jumped more than 40% in after-hours trading following the news, with initial generator deliveries expected to total $2.4 billion between 2027 and 2028.
A new report from the nonprofit Basel Action Network estimates that AI infrastructure will generate far more electronic waste than previously projected, potentially amounting to enough discarded material to fill 23 million shipping containers by 2050. Unlike earlier estimates that only counted servers and GPUs, this analysis includes power supplies, cooling systems, backup power, and networking equipment tied to data centers, plus a category BAN calls 'AI Waste Contagion.' The group attributes 15-20 percent of the world's projected 211 million metric tons of annual e-waste by 2050 to AI-related infrastructure.
A new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute finds that 53% of Americans are extremely or very concerned about AI's environmental impact, up from 41% a year ago. The rise is driven largely by Democrats, though the poll also shows widespread unease about the local effects of data centers that power AI and cloud computing.
In an interview, a Syensqo executive described a 'performance pyramid' framework, where commodity materials sit at the bottom and high-performance specialty materials sit at the top. He explained that AI's rapid advancement is piling on technical requirements—heat tolerance, purity, electrical performance, chemical and plasma resistance, long-term stability—that push semiconductor and data center materials toward the top of that pyramid, an area where Syensqo focuses its work.