Robinhood bets $25M on Crusoe’s shift from Bitcoin to AI

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) invested about $25 million in Crusoe, a firm that once mined Bitcoin but now focuses on AI data centers. The deal, which closed on August 31, was part of Crusoe’s $3.9 billion Series F fundraising round. It offers retail investors a way to gain exposure to Crusoe without investing directly in the company. Further, it highlights a broader shift in which power and computing infrastructures that are once tied to crypto mining are increasingly being redirected toward AI.

What Robinhood actually bought

According to RVI, the deal amounted to $30.9 billion post-money for Crusoe. Crusoe indicated that the financing is the initial closing of a prospective $3.9 billion Series F funding round, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Nvidia, Founders Fund and the Qatar Investment Authority were also among the contributors, alongside RVI.

According to Sarah Pinto, the president of RVI, she is more focused on the infrastructure aspect of it than the AI models alone. She stated that Crusoe is “building a unique, vertically-integrated AI infrastructure asset that uses new energy sources to run data centers,” calling its energy-first approach typical of a frontier company, which investors should have access to.

Robinhood chairman Vlad Tenev made a similar point on X, stating that the infrastructure underlying AI “matters as much as the models themselves.”

Retail access is the whole pitch

RVI began trading on the NYSE on March 6. The closed-end fund does not require accredited-investor status or an investment minimum, and Robinhood says customers can invest with as little as $1 through fractional shares. Its portfolio includes OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks, Canva and now Crusoe.

The Crusoe deal also pushes RVI’s AI strategy further down the stack. In April, the fund invested $75 million in OpenAI. Cryptopolitan reported Pinto describing OpenAI as “one of the frontier artificial intelligence companies.” Crusoe adds the energy and data-center layer that keeps those models running.

From gas flares to AI factories

Crusoe began its operations in 2018 when it started converting natural gas that is flared by oil fields into electricity for modular data centers, which was used at first for Bitcoin mining. By March of 2025, it had already deployed over 425 modular data centers in seven U.S. states and in Argentina.

In that year, Crusoe revealed that its Bitcoin mining operations and Digital Flare Mitigation subsidiary had been sold to NYDIG as the company focused on building infrastructure for AI technologies. Presently, Crusoe reports a total contracted value over $140 billion and 6GW in gross contracted capacity, with 1 GW already delivered and operational.

Why AI is rewriting mining math

Crusoe’s action indicates a bigger change in the pricing of mining infrastructure. CoinShares has reported that listed mining companies with contracted AI or HPC capacity trade at an average of 12.9 times forward sales, while those without contracts trade at a much lower rate of only 3.7 times. The more than $100 billion worth of AI/HPC backlog accounts for only $1.1 billion in terms of annualized revenue, showing that much of the worth yet depends on future developments happening in that area. S&P Global has also recorded miners repurposing their sites to accommodate AI and HPC activities.

Electricity is a common constraint for both Bitcoin mining and AI/HPC activities. Gartner estimated that in 2026 global electricity consumption by data centers will increase by 26% to reach 565 TWh, 31% of which will be contributed by AI-optimized servers. This change gives more importance to existing and permitted locations that may be used for better purposes apart from Bitcoin mining.

Crypto capital is not vanishing

The shift does not mean money is leaving crypto altogether. Galaxy Research found that investors put $5.683 billion into 384 crypto and blockchain deals in Q2, an increase of 31% from the previous quarter, with later-stage funding accounting for much of the increase. AI, however, is competing with crypto for much of the same investment money, power supplies and sites. Crusoe’s shift shows how quickly those economics can change. Infrastructure that was once used to mine Bitcoin can become far more valuable when it is repurposed for AI.

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