Data center developer Crusoe said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The massive round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG also participated, according to Crusoe.

Crusoe also announced three new board members, including Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert, Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure, and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla’s board. Straubel already has ties to Crusoe; he personally invested in the company in 2021, and Crusoe later became the first customer of Redwood’s energy storage business.

The eight-year-old company’s fresh capital infusion will help finance existing data center projects, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, used by OpenAI, as well as smaller, modular AI factories that can be transported by truck and connected to large power sources almost anywhere.

By manufacturing these modular data centers, called Spark, at its own facilities, Crusoe can deploy compute capacity quickly and without the need for large construction workforces. The smaller centers could also help Crusoe sidestep, at least in part, another major obstacle facing data center developers: backlash from local communities protesting massive complexes near their neighborhoods.

Crusoe co-founder and CEO, who is pictured above, said in a statement he believes AI will usher in an era of abundance, but to get there will mean “controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens, and we’re grateful to have investors who share that conviction.”

The company makes money by leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs, by renting out its own GPUs, and by selling compute power used to run AI models, known as inference.

This three-pronged business model has helped make Crusoe one of the most valuable AI infrastructure companies. Crusoe recently signed a massive $13 billion, five-year cloud contract to supply quantitative trading firm Jane Street with GPUs and AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported.

The company recently met with investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to discuss a potential IPO in the near future, Axios reported last month. 

The fresh fundraise comes 10 months after Crusoe raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation last October.

The company was founded in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas, but pivoted to AI infrastructure as demand for computing power skyrocketed. Crusoe’s customers include Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.

The African Action Congress, AAC, presidential candidate, Omoyele Sowore has vowed to scrap the office of the First Lady if he becomes president in 2027.

Sowore explained that the Nigerian constitution does not give room for the office of the First Lady.

Featuring on Channels Television’s Politics Tonight on Thursday, Sowore said being elected president wouldn’t change his marriage, but his wife would not take on an official role as First Lady.

He said: “The Nigerian Constitution does not include a position called First Lady. Becoming president won’t end my marriage, but I won’t take on the role of First Lady.”

He said women would still have a say in his government, but argued  that keeping a job for the president’s wife was using public money for a role that isn’t officially allowed by the Constitution.

Sowore added: “Women’s voices will be heard, but I don’t think we need a First Lady who is in a position that goes against the constitution and is just spending money that should be used for moving forward and building things.

“I’m just letting you know, based on our policies, there won’t be a position for the first lady during Sowore’s presidency.”