Crusoe CEO’s Space Data Center, The “Meta-fication” of OpenAI, Future of Wearables | Oct 24, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, October 24th. We have got a great show planned for you today. First up, I am talking to the co-founder and CEO of Crusoe about their big funding announcement and their ambitions to take cloud computing into outer space. Then we've got an all-star lineup of reporters coming on to talk about what OpenAI employees are calling the Facebookification of OpenAI. We're also talking about all things robotics. We'll discuss SoftBank's renewed robotic ambitions and how AI and robots can be used to treat cardiovascular diseases.

0:50And finally, we're talking to a VC who has just started a new fund about what consumer categories are attractive investments right now. We've got a lot to get to, so let's get right on into things. Data centers have become one of the fastest growing elements of the AI boom, and Crusoe has become one of the most closely watched companies building a business in that arena. The company has today announced it has raised more than$1.3 billion at a valuation north of$10 billion. It has also positioned itself at the center of the government's Stargate initiative alongside big names like OpenAI and Oracle.

1:24And this week, the company said it was working to offer GPU capacity from outer space by early 2027. Joining me now is the co-founder and CEO of Crusoe, Chase Lockmiller. Chase, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you. Amazing. Thanks for having me. So a big week of news and a big day today as well. I want to start with the space thing, though. So you've partnered with a company called StarCloud. You're sending GPUs into outer space. What exactly is the ambition here? Why are you guys doing this? Yeah, you know, the StarCloud partnership is one we're certainly excited about. It's a reflection of, you know, number one, our energy-first approach to building compute infrastructure.

2:10You know, in outer space, there are, you know, we have access to solar that's powered 24-7 at a very, very low cost. And, you know, there are certain applications that, you know, need to be, you know, run in outer space. And our belief is that intelligent infrastructure will be everywhere and in everything. And, you know, having access to local inference workloads in space will be a critical part to building out the space economy. So it's literally, I mean, the ambition here is to have a data center floating in outer space. That's the idea, right? Well, I think early days is really just focused on having a handful of nodes in outer space to serve local workloads.

2:56And I think that's kind of one of the key milestones. I don't see in the near term very large Stargate-sized facilities in outer space. I think there's infrastructure that needs to be run locally, and having access to compute in space is an important part to adding intelligence to the space economy. And some more silly questions here. I mean, let's talk about space debris and cooling. I mean, I know it's cold in outer space, but how do you dissipate the heat, and how do you avoid it from knocking into the other satellites? Yeah, the cooling is actually one of the interesting aspects to this because people think of space as cold, but it's actually a vacuum, which means that there's no medium in which to sort of thermally transfer the heat.

3:53So you actually have to radiate the heat. It's actually a more complex problem than building a data center here on Earth. But, you know, the StarCloud team has built out a great radiative energy or radiative cooling solution that we feel like will work well for sort of these initial deployments. So let's talk about building data centers on Earth then for a minute. You guys are our key to the Stargate initiative. How is progress going on Stargate? Things are going very well. You know, we recently announced the commissioning and, you know, going live with sort of the first few phases of the 1.2 gigawatt campus that we've been building in Abilene, Texas.

4:36You know, we're really proud of the team in terms of how we've been able to execute. We've had great partners with Oracle and OpenAI at that facility. And, you know, today it's running workloads that, you know, are powering the AI economy. One of the questions I wanted to ask you is, look, things are moving so quickly in this space, and it's not just – I mean, the money is flowing in, certainly, to fund these initiatives. Are you getting any pressure from partners to move even faster at all for an initiative like Stargate? Of course. When you move fast, everybody wants you to move faster. I think it's a reflection of the demand for compute infrastructure.

5:19There's a massive scarcity of compute today. It's a very broad-based trend that we're seeing across all of our customers in terms of people don't have enough compute to serve the workloads, the ambitions, whether it's training a new model or serving their own inference workloads for their customers. you know, there's a massive shortage of compute infrastructure to meet the current demands that we're seeing across the ecosystem. What is it like to work with, you know, I'm thinking about Oracle in this equation, because Oracle is, of all the partners that are involved, they are the public company, and they're the stock that the share movement is, you know, it's very up and down depending on any blip of information that comes out.

6:05What is it like to work with them as a partner and working with such a big public company like that? Well, you know, from our standpoint, Oracle's been an incredible partner. They've been super thoughtful, working together, you know, arm in arm, you know, to make this infrastructure project a reality. You know, they've been incredibly supportive and thoughtful in terms of the design, the construction, the build, the financing of all of this to make this project a reality. And what about your own cloud computing initiatives? It's something that you are working on at Crusoe as well. You obviously are involved in the construction of these data centers.

6:46Talk to me about what the ambition is here with your own cloud business and where you think that's going. Yeah, so at Crusoe, we really think of ourselves as an AI factory company. So we're building these factories that can produce intelligence for the world and for the economy. And that starts with the energy and the power and the infrastructure of the data centers. And it runs all the way up through the managed clusters of GPUs and managed inference workloads to produce intelligent results for end users and really produce value, this digital labor that's produced from artificial intelligence.

7:27And so, you know, we've really built a full stack solution to really help enable the overall economy here. And, you know, we've had great partners in sort of making this happen with, you know, NVIDIA, with AMD, with, you know, a number of other partners throughout the ecosystem to bring this infrastructure to life. In our cloud business, we've seen tremendous growth, tremendous demand from a lot of leading AI companies like Cursor and Fireworks and Windsurf slash Cognition. And we've really helped a lot of these customers grow as their applications have grown in demand and usage. And how do you see yourself standing out among all the other cloud providers that are popping up now?

8:10I mean, it's a really competitive space. Yeah, the NeoCloud space is absolutely an incredibly competitive space. I think from our perspective, our goal is to provide scaled solutions reliably at a favorable price performance. How do you get there? You know, we've built an incredible team ranging from, you know, the low-level or from, you know, the low-level infrastructure investments we've made in the engineering stack to create reliable solutions across not just the compute, but, you know, the storage and high performance networking solutions that are required to meet the needs of a lot of the leading AI players.

8:53And then, you know, we have an incredible customer success team and a customer support team that's really helped people work through a lot of, you know, challenges that are associated with running this infrastructure at scale. But on the price side, I'm just trying to understand the economics here. I mean, how do you get it to be such that the price is more efficient compared to all these other NeoClouds? I mean, are you looking to own these chips ultimately? I mean, Are you still leasing them? What do the economics look like? We do own the chips, right? So we purchase, you know, large quantums of GPUs through some of our OEM partners.

9:34And, you know, we install, we manage, and we operate those clusters of GPUs and integrate them with a lot of our shared services, like our, you know, managed storage products, our managed Kubernetes products that really enable customers to run the workloads that they need to serve their own specific workload. And so, I'm sorry, keep going. From a pricing, so we've been able to finance a lot of this through some asset-backed financing solutions that we've previously announced, one with Upper 90, one with Victory Park. But we've been able to sort of scale the infrastructure with asset-backed financing and I think that's been a critical aspect to standing up the infrastructures, actually having the capital to make it happen.

10:27And on that note, I did just want to ask you about sort of how you think about the level of risk right now in the AI ecosystem. Certainly from your end, if you're owning the chips, they're expensive and like you said, you talked about ways to finance that. But I mean, how do you think about the level of risk in the AI ecosystem right now and the level of risk for your company, given that it's so capital intensive to build anything in this space? Yeah, no, it's a great question, especially when you have a business that has a tremendous amount of CapEx. The way we think about this is really, you know, we are constantly doing demand forecasts in terms of, you know, how much compute demand is coming from our customers in the cloud business and how much, you know, infrastructure demand we're seeing from customers on the data center side.

11:20And right now, I think the, you know, it's very broad-based and, you know, the demand, like no one has enough compute. No one has enough data center space. No one has enough energy. You know, the capacity for infrastructure is largely saturated right now. And so we're really focused on building more to sort of meet the demands of customers. Um, you know, when we think about, uh, you know, GPU purchases, uh, you know, there, there is kind of a, you know, uh, some payback math that we go through in terms of, you know, making the upfront investment in the CapEx and working with our customers to, uh, you know, ensure that they're able to get a great service and high performance with high reliability.

12:05Um, and we're able to earn a great return for our investors. Chase, I want to ask you a quick question before I let you go. How many times have you climbed Everest? Is it once or twice? So I've been on two Everest expeditions. Two Everest expeditions. I'd say 2014, and then I summited in 2018. Okay. So it strikes me you're not afraid of a lot of things, including heights and climbing mountains. What scares you as you build Crusoe? It's such a hard business. It's a crazy time for AI right now. What keeps you up at night?

12:45I think probably the biggest risk to the business is, or the biggest risk to the ecosystem, I think, really is debt. So, you know, from our perspective, we try to be very thoughtful about how we take on debt and what our offtake looks like. And we have to have a lot of confidence that, you know, number one, we'll be able to, you know, pay down those debts through, you know, the customers that we have and the contracts that we have and the demand that we have and the services that we provide. And we'll be able to earn a very good return on top of that. But if you look at any of the major crises, financial crises that have unfolded over the course of history, many of them involved unresponsible use of leverage and of debt, taking on sort of an irresponsible amount of leverage against certain forecasts.

13:47And we just try to be conservative with that and really thoughtful about who our customers are and really having a portfolio of large investment-grade customers as well as some of the leading AI startups. And you mentioned AI demand. I mean, this is something I think about a lot with these businesses, which is that if AI demand starts to plateau at all or if it doesn't shake out the way that people think it does, what happens to Crusoe's business in that scenario? Well, I think it's sort of a matter of what the contracts look like, and we have a range of contracts across our business. But when you look at, for instance, the biggest capital investments, the biggest CapEx numbers that we have are really at the data center layer for building these gigawatt scale campuses.

14:36And in those cases, we have long-term offtakes from investment-grade customers, right? So these are long-term, very committed revenue streams that we feel will be able to weather any sort of ups and downs that we see in the AI economy and the AI demand landscape. And that's something that we've gotten comfortable with as a business and in our underwriting of a lot of those investments. Great. Well, Chase, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Chase Lockmiller, the CEO of Crucio. Okay. OpenAI isn't yet one of the big tech giants, but in some ways, it's looking like it may be where the company is headed.

15:16My colleagues today published an in-depth look at how many of OpenAI's employees are split on what they call the Facebookification of OpenAI. It's not just about where employees are coming from. It's also where the company's focus is going. Joining me now is a superstar trio of reporters. Stephanie Palazzolo, Aaron Wu, and Callie Huang cover all things AI, meta, and big tech at large. Welcome to the three of you. It's great to have you here. Thank you. Friday energy. I get it. Okay. The weekend's coming. We're almost there, guys. Let's talk about this story that you wrote. Callie, I want to start with you.

15:54So let's just look at the numbers here. I mean, how many people who are working in OpenAI right now came from Meta and how many senior executives also came from the company? Yeah. So we found that of the people who list OpenAI as their current employer on LinkedIn, about 630 previously worked at Meta. So that's about a fifth of the company. And it's a lot of the company's leaders. Fiji Simo, the CEO of Applications, was formerly head of Facebook. The CTO of Applications also used to work at Facebook. And if you go through the C-suite, it's a lot of people who had leadership roles at Facebook in the late 2010s, early 2020s.

16:37But people are also going to Meta, right? Because we've written a lot about Meta poaching a lot of this talent. Yeah, of course. Meta recruited very aggressively from OpenAI this summer. And is there anything about this that is OpenAI trying to get back at Meta? Or maybe, you know, is it something about talent and meta that is really good or anything like that? I think, you know, I think a lot of this hiring has been happening since before this summer. But there are very few companies that have operated at the scale at which meta operates at. So, you know, as OpenAI grows up, there are only so many companies to hire from.

17:19So, Erin, how has that sort of influenced the direction that OpenAI might be going now with not just the company's strategy, but also the company's culture? Yeah, so we wrote in the story about how there are some processes that employees feel like have been taken from OpenAI. So we talked about Kevin Weil, who wrote this long product memo where he talked about wanting OpenAI to become like a tooth-rich product that people use every day. Those are words that are borrowed from Larry Page, who's the CEO of Google. And so there are some people who feel like this borrowing from big tech is giving processes to a company that has been quite chaotic, has grown really, really quickly.

17:58And so maybe some of this isn't a bad thing. But there's also a focus on process and bureaucracy in terms like directly responsible individual and like SEV and like things that have been borrowed from big tech companies that for some make them nostalgic for the days of being like a scrappier, smaller startup. There was some good detail in the story about the survey that went out. Tell us about that. Yeah. So earlier this year, there was a survey that was sent out by this employee-driven task force that was essentially asking people who had come from big tech backgrounds whether they felt like the culture at OpenAI was becoming too much like a big tech company and what they were meant to do about that.

18:41So it's interesting because actually originally the survey was kind of framed as the Facebookification or the Metafication of OpenAI and later was kind of brought in to include just broader bid tech companies. But it really shows the kind of influence that Meta and Facebook has been having on OpenAI and the mindshare that that bid tech company specifically has had kind of within this group of OpenAI employees. And so this is actually a survey that employees asked to have answered? Yeah, so at OpenAI, they sometimes set up these kind of task forces, which go after these big questions that they might be wondering about, like, are we becoming too much like Meta, for instance?

19:23And so, yeah, these are kind of employee-driven surveys and task forces. Well, Callie, this is kind of an interesting time for a survey like this to go out because then you look at the products and you look at Sora, for example, and OpenAI now moving into the social media realm. I mean, it's not just culture. It's sort of taking after meta a little bit in terms of business model too, right? I wonder how employees feel about that. Yeah, I mean, some people, frankly, we found are not so happy about it. They've expressed doubts that Sora is the right direction for OpenAI. They're worried about OpenAI's ability to handle these problems that have long plagued social media companies like Meta.

20:02So content moderation, for example. And in the lead up to Sora's release, Sam Altman tried to ease some of those anxieties. He told employees, you know, Sora doesn't necessarily further OpenAI's goal of superintelligence, but in the future with superintelligence, people are still going to want fun, lighthearted content. and Meta has actually had a very similar recruiting pitch to researchers. Steph, I kind of want to come back to you because I sort of think about the strategy that Sam Altman has sort of built for the company and it very much is a bit of the spaghetti strategy right now where they're trying a lot of different things at once.

20:43Is this kind of inevitable as a company grows up in your mind? I mean, surely there must be people at the company who are actually saying, well, yeah, I mean, the goal is to be as big as Facebook. we have to go through this transformation. Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways, like OpenAI is obviously a company that wants to make a profit someday. And right now it's on track to burn$115 billion from 2025 to 2029. So it's obviously going to have to come out with products that are making money to make a dent in that cash burn. So I think in some ways people think that it is kind of just a part of growing up and a part of being a big tech company.

21:20But at the same time, I think it's just strange, I think, to see Sam Altman talk about AI that can cure cancer, that can fix the education system. And then at the same time, you see products like Zora coming out, which are obviously just very similar to social media companies we've seen in the past, things like TikTok. talk. And we've also seen at the same time, even Sam changes viewpoints on things like ads going from saying that he finds ads uniquely unsettling to saying that there are types of ads that he is interested in and having at OpenAI. Aaron, I kind of want to take a step back here and just talk a little bit about Sam Altman as a leader.

22:07Mark Zuckerberg at one point was in his dorm room, and he's obviously grown the company into this big juggernaut. OpenAI right now, they're at about 3 ,000 employees, I think is what we said in the story. And so they still have a ways to go to be as big as Meta. But I mean, just riff with me here a little bit on the parallels between Sam Altman as a leader, Mark Zuckerberg's trajectory. Do people sort of see him as the next Mark Zuckerberg? Do they sort of hope that he might avoid some of the challenges that Zuckerberg had to go through along the way? What's people's thinking around that? Yeah, so I've been thinking about this for the past couple years.

22:44There's a message from me in Slack in 2023 where I'm like, Sam Altman is going to be the Mark Zuckerberg of this generation. And I've been kind of wagered that Sam Altman has also been thinking very specifically about this. And I think a lot of what he's done has been trying to position himself, maybe to try to position himself differently from Mark Zuckerberg. One of the things about Sam Altman is for a long time, He was very accessible to the media. He's been around forever. In the lead up to this, I was rereading an essay that our founder, Jessica Lassman, wrote about knowing him since he was the kid in the 2000s working on Loot, his first basically failed startup.

23:23So I think he's been around forever and he's seen what's happened with Mark Zuckerberg. And I think for a long time, he was trying to position himself as very accessible, very sober. He cares about the harms this technology could have. A couple of years ago, he was on the Hill doing this whole big listening tour where he was talking about the kinds of AI regulation he wanted, like meeting with Congress. So I think for a long time, he was trying to position himself as almost, if anything, like the anti-Mark Zuckerberg. I think as the company has gotten bigger, as it's harder to do the like, ah, shucks, like boy wonder thing, like I think it works less well.

23:58But I think it's a really interesting parallel that will be worth continuing to pay attention to. Great. Well, Steph, Callie and Aaron, I want to thank you for joining us. It was a great story. It's on our website right now. And with that, we're going to move to our next segment. SoftBank is renewing its robot ambitions, even as prior efforts over the past decade have faced hurdles. This week, the information reported that the company discussed a$900 billion acquisition of Agility Robotics, a 10-year-old startup led by a former Microsoft executive. I want to play a conversation I had with our very own Rocket Drew about why that deal fell through.

24:33Here is that conversation. Hey, Rocket, how are you doing? Hey, I'm doing good. How about you, Akash? Doing good. Okay, so SoftBank is doing robots. I guess it's been doing it for a while. I haven't been paying attention to it. But tell us about this company that they were talking about buying. Yeah, that's right. So SoftBank has been in the robotics game for a long time. But what we're reporting is that SoftBank and Agility Robotics held talks about a possible acquisition late last year. And a price that was discussed in that meeting was at least$900 million for Agility. SoftBank has been interested in robotics for a long time.

25:10but AI is igniting a new wave of interest in robotics for many investors, and SoftBank seems to be no exception. And why didn't the deal go through? Well, Agility went on to raise a new funding round. So Agility is currently raising at least$300 million. We reported$400 million in a funding round that would value the company at a$1.75 billion valuation before the money. So basically almost twice what SoftBank was going to buy it at. and and and rock it we're gonna keep going but you can't nod on tv you got to keep going with we're gonna keep it going so i'm being careful about the numbers the cost okay i understand okay uh look i do want to talk about softbank's robotics strategies though broadly so you you had a great table in the story that everyone should should check out i mean tell us about some of the other investments that softbank has has made in this category and whether or not they they've panned out to be successful.

26:10It's still quite early for robotics. It is very early. I think the main takeaway is that there have been a number of investments from SoftBank. I mean, the table that we put together has more than 10 robotics companies, and we had to be pretty sparing about which ones we included because it was a long list. So SoftBank's robotics efforts took off in a major way. Call it 10 years ago. They came up with this robot called Pepper that was sort of meant to be a robot companion. It was meant to be emotional, and it became the talk of the town. I mean, it appeared with Masayoshi Son on stage. It appeared at Silicon Valley events.

26:42It greeted people as they walked into cell phone stores, as they walked into office lobbies. So Pepper was kind of the poster child of SoftBank Robotics. And SoftBank also owned Boston Dynamics, the longtime robotics maker. SoftBank ended up letting go of 80 % of its stake in Boston Dynamics, but still holds on to 20%. But there were a number of other robotics bets that didn't pan out as well like the startup Zoom Pizza, which was intended to be a robotic pizza delivery startup, basically. And that company ended up going under. So there were some bets that didn't pan out early on. So you made this point in the story.

27:21You talked about how SoftBank's approach to robotics was sort of similar to its approach with data centers. What did you mean by that? Yeah, that's right. When I talked to analysts for this story, they pointed out that Masayoshi-san is really into infrastructure. I mean, he's getting into all aspects of AI, building models, data centers, chips to run the models, and physical AI is a part of that picture. But similar to how Masa is interested in the infrastructure for developing and running AI models, it would be natural for him to be interested in the infrastructure to develop robots as well. And in this case, that's physical infrastructure.

27:58It's robots to build other robots, potentially. So SoftBank recently decided to acquire ABB Robotics. It's the robotics division of ABB Group, which is this industrial giant. It's a Swiss company. And that's mostly industrial robots. It's like robot arms. It's rolling bases to move boxes and pallets around in warehouses. But that kind of equipment, that machinery could potentially be useful for the robotics efforts that SoftBank already has going, and also as infrastructure to develop robots in the future. Tommy, I want to ask you about this debate here, whether or not humanoids are the best form factor to do industrial work.