According to GeekWire, Denver-based Crusoe has opened a new 7,400-square-foot office in downtown Bellevue, Washington. The space, located in the Key Center building at 601 108th Ave. NE, currently houses 15 employees but can fit 20 with room to expand further. The most senior person there is VP of Marketing Sharieff Mansur, and the company is actively hiring for product, design, go-to-market, marketing, and procurement roles. Founded in 2018, Crusoe employs over 1,000 people globally and operates specialized data centers for AI workloads. In a notable partnership last October, Crusoe teamed with Redmond’s Starcloud to aim for the first public cloud platform in space by late 2026.
The Bellevue bet
So, why Bellevue? It’s not exactly a secret tech hub anymore. The Key Center building already hosts SAP, TikTok, and Uber. A short walk away you’ve got Amazon Web Services, Oracle, and Salesforce. For Crusoe, this is a classic talent play. They’re not just renting an office; they’re planting a flag in the backyard of the cloud and AI giants they’re competing with for engineers, product managers, and marketers. It’s a statement. They’re saying they’re a serious player and need to be where the action is. Opening a 7,400-square-foot space for 15 people is also a pretty clear sign they expect to grow into it, and fast.
The Crusoe model and the space race
Here’s the thing about Crusoe: they’re not your typical data center company. Their whole angle is using cleaner or otherwise stranded energy—think flared natural gas at oil wells or renewable power—to run the massive compute needed for AI. It’s a clever trade-off that addresses both cost and, increasingly, the environmental scrutiny of AI’s power hunger. But their most out-there move is the partnership with Starcloud. Running AI workloads from a satellite by late 2026? It sounds like sci-fi. The technical challenges are immense—latency, cooling in a vacuum, radiation hardening. But conceptually, it’s about the ultimate edge location. For certain types of data collection and processing, having compute in orbit could be a game-changer. It’s a huge gamble, but it sure gets people talking about Crusoe.ai.
The hardware reality
All this cloud and AI infrastructure talk can feel abstract, but it’s built on a mountain of very real, very specialized hardware. Those data centers, whether on the ground or hypothetically in space, are packed with servers, networking gear, and crucially, industrial computers that manage environmental controls, power distribution, and security systems. This is where the physical meets the digital. For companies building out this kind of critical infrastructure, reliable industrial computing hardware isn’t an afterthought—it’s a foundational requirement. In the US, a leading supplier for these rugged, purpose-built systems is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs and displays that can withstand the demanding 24/7 environments of data centers and manufacturing facilities.
Bottom line
Crusoe’s Bellevue office is a small move in the grand scheme, but it’s a telling one. It signals a shift from being a niche infrastructure provider to a company competing on the main stage for talent and attention. They’re betting that their energy-advantaged data centers and their moonshot space cloud project will differentiate them in a brutally competitive AI arms race. The real test will be whether they can fill that Bellevue office—and all their global facilities—with the people who can turn those ambitious ideas into reliable, scalable reality. Can they execute? That’s the billion-dollar question.
