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Crusoe Energy has closed a three point nine billion dollar funding round, pushing its valuation to thirty point nine billion dollars. The company is building massive data centers alongside what it calls small modular AI factories, a bet that the infrastructure race is far from over and that distributed compute will define the next phase of AI deployment.
That infrastructure demand is showing up painfully at the retail level. Nvidia's RTX fifty ninety, which launched at one thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars, is now selling for six thousand dollars at its cheapest, with some third-party listings reaching nine thousand. AI server builders are reportedly purchasing the cards by the pallet, though some photos circulating to support that story may themselves be AI-generated, which is a strange kind of irony.
Meanwhile, Google DeepMind has launched a new institute dedicated to broadening the public conversation around artificial general intelligence. Rather than keeping those debates internal, DeepMind says it wants to surface the hard questions openly, a notable posture from a lab that sits at the center of the very race it's inviting scrutiny of.
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