Read time: 5 minutes
Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.
This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.
Today we’ll distill a company that’s powering high-performance AI while drastically reducing emissions and energy costs: Crusoe 🇺🇸
Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.
What Problem Does Crusoe Tackle❓
They tackle both the increasing energy demand of AI and the massive waste of energy produced by several sources.
1. Renewable Energy Curtailment: As wind and solar capacity grows, grid operators increasingly waste excess renewable energy when supply exceeds demand. In 2024, California alone literally threw away $800 million worth of clean energy because the grid couldn’t absorb it all.
2. AI’s Energy Hunger: With AI demand surging, data centers are expected to eat up 8% of all global energy by 2030, creating a conflict between the massive computational power needed for AI and environmental sustainability. Traditional cloud providers struggle to meet this demand cleanly and cost-effectively.
3. Energy Waste Through Gas Flaring: $16 billion of gas went up in smoke globally in 2022. This "associated gas" is produced as a byproduct when oil is extracted but gets burned off because there's often no infrastructure to capture and transport it economically or as pressure relief for safety.
4. Stranded Energy Assets: Crude oil and natural gas often coexist in reservoirs, leading to natural gas flaring when oil is extracted. Much of this gas is in remote locations where traditional infrastructure to capture and transport it would be economically unfeasible.
5. Significant Climate Impact: Gas flaring emits approximately 400 million tons of CO2 equivalent annually worldwide — around 1% of total global emissions. The combustion releases CO2, methane, and other hazardous air pollutants.
Lots of wasted energy and rapidly increasing data center energy demand…
Product / Service 📦
Crusoe transforms all of this wasted energy into high-performance AI cloud infrastructure. They make the unusable, usable. Here's why they're so awesome:
Digital Flare Mitigation (DFM): Their patented system captures stranded gas from oil flare sites and converts it into electricity to power modular data centers in 40-foot shipping containers. This reduces methane emissions by 98% and overall CO2-equivalent emissions by 63% compared to traditional flaring.
Digital Renewable Optimization (DRO): Crusoe positions computing workloads near renewable energy sources to monetize excess solar and wind power that would otherwise be curtailed during grid oversupply periods.
Cost Advantage: Energy is the biggest driver of compute cost, and by squeezing value out of energy that has little value to anyone else, they’re able to deliver AI infrastructure that’s 81% less expensive than traditional cloud providers.
Top Quality Infrastructure: Provides 99.98% uptime with NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, featuring industry-leading start times and performance optimization tools that reduce inference times by up to 30%.
Crazy Speed: Crusoe delivers AI infrastructure up to 20x faster than traditional hyperscalers (AWS, Google, etc.). Clients access hundreds of GPUs in hours instead of weeks.
Vertically Integrated Approach: From real-time power orchestration to on-site deployments, they optimize every watt. This allows them to control the entire stack from energy generation to computing delivery, ensuring maximum efficiency and minimal waste throughout the process.
Market 🌐
You already know the AI cloud market is growing like a 100000% every year. There’s demand, no doubt. The niche of sustainable compute power will increase even faster as more customers and governments demand it.
Other Key Players
All the big names (Google, Oracle, AWS, etc.) own the vast majority of the market share and they are heavily investing in clean energy projects around solar, wind, and lots of nuclear recently.
NexGen Cloud 🇬🇧: Has all its infrastructure hosted in data centres powered by 100% renewable energy. Strong focus on efficient energy use, cooling and energy management.
Evroc 🇸🇪: Building the world’s cleanest cloud by creating a sovereign, sustainable, and secure hyperscale infrastructure designed for the European market.
Founding Story 🦄
Crusoe was founded in 2018 by Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness in Denver, Colorado. They are a perfect match. Chase has a background in math, physics, AI and quantitative trading and Cully came from geology and sustainability, with experience in renewable energy projects and energy investment banking.
Their initial focus was on reducing natural gas flaring by converting stranded energy resources into power for Bitcoin mining, proving they could build robust data centers where the grid couldn’t reach.
As demand for machine learning compute grew, they pivoted from Bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure, leveraging their energy-first approach and expertise in deploying hardware in challenging environments.
They did $276 million in 2024 revenue, they’re operating 86 mobile data centers, expanding very quickly worldwide and they work with the biggest companies out there (they’ll be key in OpenAI’s $500B Stargate project).
Their massive campus in Abilene, Texas is about to open and will have 8 data centers running on 100% clean energy. Total power capacity… 1.2 gigawatts (4% of the global total data center electricity capacity as of 2023).
Top Impact Stats 📈
1. In 2024, 87% of their energy came from their Digital Flare Mitigation (DFM) and 13% from renewable energy power purchase agreements (PPAs) and energy attribute certificates (EACs).
2. Their DFM® systems have a methane destruction efficiency of 99.9% versus an average of 91.1% for flares, which drastically cuts down methane emissions. FYI: methane is the second largest contributor to GHG emissions after CO2.
3. Since they started operating, thanks to DFM tech alone, Crusoe has prevented 21 billion cubic feet of gas from being flared and avoided 2.7 million metric tones CO2 equivalent emissions (50% of those in 2024 alone) — like removing 600,000 cars from the road.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
Scale and optimize your climate business: I build low-code automation systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.
Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.
Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)