Crusoe AI review: A deep dive into the AI infrastructure pioneer

You've probably heard the name Crusoe AI floating around. They’ve got a pretty cool mission: powering AI with clean or otherwise wasted energy. And with big names like NVIDIA and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund backing them, they're definitely not a small fish.

But let's get real. If you're trying to figure out how to use AI in your business, is Crusoe the answer? This Crusoe AI review will break down what they actually offer, how much it costs, and why, for most teams, it might be the wrong tool for the job. We'll explore why building AI from the ground up is a massive undertaking and why a ready-to-go platform is often a much smarter play.

What is Crusoe AI?

Let's clear one thing up right away: Crusoe isn't an AI tool you can just download and start using. They're an infrastructure company, their full name is Crusoe Energy, which gives you a hint. What they sell is raw computing power through their Crusoe Cloud, the kind you need to build and train AI models.

Their whole business model is pretty clever. They set up data centers next to energy sources that would otherwise be wasted, like flared natural gas from oil fields, and use it to power their machines. This gives them a greener footprint and a unique angle in the market. They basically control the entire stack, from the power to the cloud services they offer.

This approach has definitely caught investors' eyes, they recently pulled in $600 million in funding, valuing the company at $2.8 billion. But their customers are a very specific crowd: hardcore technical teams who need raw access to GPUs to build custom AI from scratch.

What Crusoe AI actually provides

Crusoe is all about the building blocks of AI, the hardware and data centers that do the heavy lifting. You can think of them as selling the high-tech bricks and mortar for the AI world.

Core offerings: GPUs and data centers

At its heart, Crusoe Cloud offers what you'd expect from a serious cloud provider: virtual machines loaded with powerful GPUs, fast storage, and tools like Kubernetes to manage it all.

They've got a roster of the latest hardware that makes AI developers drool, including:

• NVIDIA GPUs: H200, H100, A100, and the upcoming B200.

• AMD GPUs: MI300X.

Getting your hands on this kind of gear is a big part of their appeal. The whole operation is powered by their special Digital Flare Mitigation® (DFM) tech, which captures flared gas at oil wells and turns it into electricity on the spot. It’s a smart way to solve an environmental problem and power the AI boom at the same time.

The catch: It's just infrastructure

And here's the part you really need to pay attention to. Crusoe gives you the tools, but you have to do all the work. When you sign up, you get a powerful server, and that's pretty much it. Your team is on the hook for building, deploying, managing, and fixing whatever AI application you create on top of it.

This is a huge deal. If you’re a Head of Customer Service or an IT Manager, this approach is a non-starter. You’d have to hire a whole team of expensive AI engineers just to begin. You could be waiting months, or even longer, before you see any actual results for your business.

This is exactly why platform-based solutions exist. For teams who need to solve problems now, like automating support tickets, answering employee questions instantly, or just making things run smoother, a ready-made tool is the only way to go.

A platform like eesel AI, for example, is built to start working in minutes. Instead of a blank server, you get a complete solution that connects directly to the tools you already use, like Zendesk, Slack, or Confluence. All the complicated stuff is handled for you, so you can worry about improving your customer experience, not managing servers.

Crusoe AI pricing

Crusoe's pricing is pretty standard for a cloud infrastructure company. You've got flexible options like on-demand, spot, and reserved instances for their GPUs, but it can get complicated. You’re billed by the hour, and the cost depends entirely on the hardware you choose.

Here’s a quick look at their on-demand prices to give you a sense of what you’d be paying:

GPUs	Total VRAM	vCPUs	RAM	Billing	Price/h
1x A40	48GB	6	60GB	On-Demand	$0.90
1x L40S	48GB	8	147GB	On-Demand	$1.00
1x A100	80GB	12	120GB	On-Demand	$1.65
8x A100 (SXM)	640GB	96	960GB	On-Demand	$15.60
8x MI300X	1536GB	240	2000GB	On-Demand	$27.60
8x H100 (SXM)	640GB	176	960GB	On-Demand	$31.20
8x H200 (SXM)	1128GB	176	2000GB	On-Demand	$34.32

Heads up: Pricing was sourced from public data in June 2025 and can change. Always check Crusoe's website for the latest numbers.

The tricky part here is that your bill is tied directly to how much compute time you use. That can be tough to predict and even harder to connect to actual business results. For a support team, what does an hour of H100 time really mean in terms of solved tickets or happier customers? If you have a busy month, you could get hit with a surprisingly big bill that doesn't really reflect the value you delivered.

That’s a big difference from eesel AI's pricing model. With eesel AI, plans are based on a set number of AI interactions per month. You're never charged per ticket or resolution, so you're not punished for being successful. This lets you scale up your AI support without worrying about unpredictable costs. You know your bill is tied to the value you're getting, not just the servers you're using.

Crusoe AI: Pros and cons

So, who is Crusoe really for? Let's look at the good and the not-so-good.

Pros

• Top-of-the-line hardware: You can't argue with their hardware. Crusoe offers access to some of the most powerful and sought-after GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD. If your team is training huge AI models, this is a massive plus.

• A green mission: The company's focus on sustainable energy is a big deal, especially for businesses that care about their environmental impact. Turning wasted energy into computing power is just a smart move.

• Built for big jobs: Their infrastructure is designed to be reliable. They get that enterprise-level AI projects need to run for weeks or months without a hiccup.

• Heavy-hitter backing: With support from giants like NVIDIA, you can be confident that Crusoe isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Downsides and limitations

• It's seriously technical: This is probably the biggest hurdle. Crusoe isn't a platform you can just sign up for and start using. You have to go through a sales process and have a team of specialized engineers ready to manage everything. You’ll be measuring your time-to-value in months, not minutes.

• It's not a business solution: Crusoe doesn't solve a specific business problem right out of the box. A support manager can't just log in and start closing tickets faster. It’s a box of parts for engineers, not a finished product for business teams.

• Some internal growing pains: If you peek at employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Comparably, you'll see some common themes. Employees often talk about a chaotic environment and "growing pains." Some reviews mention leadership being "out of touch" and a lack of clear processes. For a big company relying on their service, these kinds of internal issues can sometimes bubble up as spotty support or reliability problems.

• You only get one piece of the puzzle: Crusoe is focused almost entirely on compute power. They don't provide any of the other tools you'd need to build a full solution, like workflow automation, knowledge management, or an analytics dashboards. You have to bring all of that yourself.

This is where a platform like eesel AI takes a completely different road. It's built so you can get started yourself and go live in minutes, not months. With one-click connections to your help desk and knowledge bases, a fully customizable workflow builder, and the power to bring all your scattered information together instantly, it gives you a complete support automation solution, no engineers needed.

This video explores how Crusoe is leveraging its unique energy-capturing model to build a powerful presence in the AI infrastructure market.

Is Crusoe AI the right choice for you?

So, what's the verdict in our Crusoe AI review?

Crusoe is a seriously impressive company doing innovative work in the AI infrastructure space. They are the perfect choice for a very specific customer: a well-funded, highly technical organization building massive, custom AI models from the ground up. If that's you, Crusoe is a fantastic option.

But for almost everyone else, especially support, IT, and ops teams, trying to build on raw infrastructure like Crusoe is a recipe for a slow, expensive headache. It means hiring specialized talent you probably don't have and shouldn't need to have.

If your goal is to solve business problems today, to automate support, help your agents, and make customers happier, you need a platform, not a pile of parts. It makes sense to start with a solution that was actually designed to do the job you need done.

Ready to see what a ready-made platform can do for you? Give eesel AI a try and see how it can transform your support operations.