AI compute provider Crusoe: CoreWeave (CRWV.US) selloff is "overblown," AI compute demand is "overwhelming"

Chase Lochmiller, CEO of data center developer and AI compute provider Crusoe, said Tuesday at the Bloomberg Invest conference in Dallas that the recent selloff in so-called "neoclouds" is "overblown," and that competitor CoreWeave (CRWV.US) has struck "some very good deals." Crusoe has contracts with companies including Meta Platforms, Oracle Corporation, and Alphabet's Alphabet Inc. Class C. "I'm fairly adamant that a lot of the anxiety is overblown, a bit of an overreaction," Lochmiller said. "I know CoreWeave has done some very good deals, and they're in a pretty good position." AI compute provider CoreWeave is at the center of mounting market concerns over the resilience of the AI infrastructure boom and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt financing. This month, its bonds plunged to distressed levels, and the company's stock price has tumbled more than 30%. Founded in 2018, Crusoe is best known for developing large-scale data center projects, including the flagship sites in Texas for OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate project. But the company also sells AI cloud computing capacity, joining emerging neoclouds such as CoreWeave to meet surging AI demand from large enterprises. Last month, Crusoe raised more than US$3 billion in a funding round at a valuation of about US$30 billion. The company has attracted prominent investors including NVIDIA Corporation and Salesforce. However, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that despite Crusoe's substantial fundraising, some technology companies still question the upstart's ability to bring large-scale, resource-intensive data centers online and keep them running. Earlier this year, Crusoe suffered another setback in Abilene, Texas: Oracle and OpenAI decided not to lease additional capacity from Crusoe, though the space was later taken up by Microsoft Corporation. Lochmiller said Crusoe still sees "overwhelming demand," and that demand is "deep and broad."