Chase Lochmiller is the Co-founder and CEO of Crusoe. Crusoe builds and powers the data centres that companies use to train and run AI. It has raised approximately $6.4 billion in equity, including its latest $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation. Its backers include NVIDIA, Founders Fund, Gavin Baker’s Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:06 How Mountaineering Shaped Chase as a Founder
06:44 Why Having Money Can Make Founders Take Bigger Risks
09:54 How Crusoe Went From Bitcoin Mining to AI Infrastructure
13:15 The ChatGPT Moment That Changed Crusoe’s Strategy
17:05 The Real Bottleneck in AI Infrastructure Today
17:54 How Crusoe Built in 1 Year What Others Said Would Take 2.5 Years
21:48 Energy & Labor: The Biggest Constraints on AI Data Centers
25:32 Why Chase Says the Data Center Water Argument Is Wrong
26:43 Do Data Centers Actually Raise Energy Prices?
29:32 Why 50% of Planned Data Centers May Never Get Built
31:14 Why Data Centers Became Politically Toxic
33:48 The Economics of GPUs and AI Compute
36:39 Crusoe’s Strategy: Sell Data Centers, GPUs and Tokens
37:48 Building the “Exxon of AI Infrastructure”
39:00 Where the Highest Margins Are in AI Infrastructure Today
39:14 What “Take-or-Pay” Really Means in AI Compute
41:45 The Real Risk of GPU Depreciation
43:19 Why Old GPUs May Stay Valuable Far Longer Than Expected
44:20 How Crusoe Forecasts AI Compute Demand
48:27 Does the Lowest-Cost Producer of Intelligence Win?
51:55 Why Not All Inference Providers Are Created Equal
53:54 Open vs Closed Models: Where the Tokens and Dollars Go
56:10 What Managed Inference Looks Like in Five Years
57:00 Quick-fire Round
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