Crusoe, the industry's first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, and AI innovator Thinking Machines Lab today announced a $65 million annual agreement to power inference for the lab's open models on Crusoe Cloud. Announced on September 23, 2026 in San Francisco, the AI lab will run its production workloads on Crusoe Managed Inference, tuned for throughput, price-performance, and reliability.
Through Crusoe Managed Inference, Thinking Machines Lab will serve a range of production workloads including its Inkling models, GLM 5.2 and 5.3, and its own fine-tuned variants on a dedicated Tailored Deployment of NVIDIA HGX B200 systems connected with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
The AI lab will run its production workloads on Crusoe Managed Inference, engineered for high-throughput, cost-efficient serving at scale. Crusoe will run and support the cluster directly as a Tailored Deployment, a dedicated, benchmarked, SLA-backed endpoint, giving Thinking Machines Lab the price-performance and headroom to scale without managing its own inference stack.
The infrastructure is designed to deliver cost-efficient, reliable infrastructure, inference, and model lifecycle tooling as-a-service, enabling innovative companies to run favorite models in production at scale.
“Crusoe Managed Inference took us from evaluation to production quickly and met the standards we hold our own systems to, giving us the scale and economics to reinvest in the research at the core of what we do,” said Myle Ott, ML Infra Lead at Thinking Machines Lab.
“Thinking Machines Lab has a very sophisticated engineering team that expects partners to meet their high bar as they grow,” said Erwan Menard, SVP, Product Management of Crusoe Cloud. “Our team of leading AI engineers built Crusoe Managed Inference to deliver cost-efficient, reliable infrastructure, inference, and model lifecycle tooling as-a-service, so innovative companies can run their favorite models in production at scale, relying on our expertise.”
The deployment leverages NVIDIA HGX B200 systems connected with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, engineered for high-throughput AI inference. The Tailored Deployment model provides Thinking Machines Lab with dedicated infrastructure that meets enterprise standards for reliability and price-performance.
The companies are also looking to expand into batch inference for large-scale synthetic data generation, turning inference into a flywheel for research. Thinking Machines Lab joins a roster that has taken Crusoe Managed Inference past $100 million in contracted ARR less than a year from launch.
The partnership highlights growing demand for vertically integrated AI infrastructure that combines energy-efficient data centers with managed inference services for open-model production workloads.
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As the AI factory company, Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. The company provides a reliable, scalable, cost-effective, energy-first solution for AI infrastructure. By harnessing large-scale energy sources, building AI-optimized data centers, and delivering a powerful AI cloud platform, Crusoe empowers its customers and partners to build the future faster.
