Oracle is reportedly set to lease a data center from Crusoe Energy.
The Information, which this week broke the news that Elon Musk's generative AI startup xAI has pulled out of a major AI deal with Oracle Cloud, has followed up that Oracle may be about to sign a major leasing deal with Crusoe, which specializes in cryptomining and AI data centers.
After Musk confirmed the xAI/Oracle story on X (formerly Twitter), he hinted that another company is making progress in hosting AI hardware.
Musk called Oracle a “great company,” and said there "is another company that shows promise" in helping Oracle set up a cluster of Nvidia GB200 chips for OpenAI.
The Information reports that the other company is Crusoe Energy, and that it is close to signing a deal with Oracle.
As part of its deal to rent 100,000 advanced GPUs to Microsoft for OpenAI's use, Oracle is nearing an agreement with Crusoe in Abilene, Texas, the report said. Crusoe is expected to operate the data center that Oracle will lease. Then Oracle will put GPUs in that facility and rent the servers to Microsoft, which will give those chips to OpenAI.
DCD has reached out to Crusoe and Oracle for comment.
Lancium, which Crusoe has previously partnered with, is developing a cryptomine data center site in Abilene. When given the go-ahead in 2021, Project Artemis was described as a "renewable energy power data center campus" to be built on around 800 acres of land around Spinks Road and Summerhill Road in Taylor County. Able to offer 200MW, it reportedly has the potential to reach 1GW. Ground was set to break in Q1 2022.
As DCD reported last week, Crusoe is pivoting from placing data center modules along oil pipelines to permanent data center buildings, and has come up with a design able to offer 100MW and host up to 100,000 GPUs.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe first launched with a service to deliver containerized data centers to oil wells in the US, where they would harness natural gas that would otherwise be "flared off" and wasted.
Originally the company was using the energy for Bitcoin mining, but later extended its compute services to HPC and AI through its Crusoe Cloud offering. Crusoe’s move to more permanent hosting locations began late last year when the company announced a deal to locate a number of GPUs in atNorth's ICE02 data center in Iceland. The company has also partnered with Digital Realty.
In its most recent ESG report, published last month, Crusoe said it has around 200MW of deployed capacity; around a third of its Crusoe Cloud offering was powered by gas flare sites, while the remainder was powered by third-party data centers. The company is also planning to deploy 100MW of behind-the-meter capacity at a wind farm.
Amid supply shortages, it's not unusual to see cloud providers lease GPU capacity from rivals. Microsoft has previously signed a “multi-billion dollar” deal with GPU cloud provider CoreWeave.
Oracle and Microsoft have previously partnered to place Oracle hardware inside Microsoft Azure data centers.
A number of crypto firms are making major pivots into AI, both setting up their own GPU clouds and hosting hardware for providers (and in some cases both). Companies making the switch include CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Northern Data, Hut 8, and Applied Digital.
