Saquon Barkley Just Joined a Billion-Dollar AI Funding Round
Saquon Barkley Just Joined a Billion-Dollar AI Funding Round
Sports - November 22, 2025
Inside the running back’s surprising investment in Crusoe and why athletes are chasing the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence.
Saquon Barkley has spent his entire football career outrunning physics. Power, speed, torque—he turns defensive fronts into highlight reels. But in 2025, Barkley made a move that had nothing to do with jukes or yards after contact. He put his money into Crusoe, the fast-rising AI-compute startup that just pulled in a staggering $1.4 billion funding round.
It’s the kind of deal you’d expect from sovereign wealth funds and deep-pocketed venture firms—not an NFL running back. Yet there Barkley was, listed among the investors backing one of the most aggressively expanding infrastructure companies in the AI boom.
Crusoe isn’t building apps or chatbots. They’re building the physical backbone that makes AI possible—data centers, GPU clusters, power-efficient compute infrastructure. They’ve become known for turning stranded energy and flared natural gas into low-cost electricity to run high-performance computing systems. In a year when AI training costs have shot into the stratosphere, Crusoe has positioned itself as the company that can make compute faster, cleaner, cheaper, and everywhere.
make compute faster, cleaner, cheaper, and everywhere.
That’s the world Barkley just stepped into.
When the round closed, Business Insider highlighted his participation as part of a broader strategic push by Crusoe to bring in cultural and athletic figures. For Barkley, this wasn’t a vanity investment. This was a move into the hardest part of the AI economy—the infrastructure that everyone wants but few understand.
The interesting thing about Barkley is that he’s not a spray-and-pray investor. He’s been vocal over the years about the need for athletes to think beyond short playing windows and build long-term financial portfolios. And he’s watched other athletes—Kevin Durant, Aaron Rodgers, Serena Williams—move early into tech sectors that exploded later. Barkley is part of a new class of players who see venture investing not as a side project, but as a second career running in parallel with the first.
Crusoe fits that vision. The company is backed by everyone from G2 Venture Partners to Melinda French Gates, and its $1.4 billion round was driven by the race for AI compute. Companies need GPUs, specialized data centers, and enormous power loads to train the massive models driving the next wave of artificial intelligence. Crusoe’s edge comes from its ability to produce that compute with lower costs and lower emissions—turning energy waste into high-value processing power.
For Barkley, the move shows an understanding of where the real money is going in AI. Not in buzzy consumer apps. Not in front-end interfaces. But in the raw infrastructure—the stuff NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google obsess over. The stuff that wins arms races.
There’s a broader trend worth noting here. Athletes have been sliding into AI deals with surprising speed. Kevin Durant backed the speech-AI company Yakkertech years before athletes started publicly talking about AI. Patrick Mahomes invested in Whoop, the wearables company now building AI-driven biometrics. Naomi Osaka and Steph Curry have put money into tech companies reinventing content, health, and digital identity. And McConaughey, although not an athlete, just turned his voice into an AI product.
The message is clear: cultural figures aren’t waiting for the tech world to come to them—they’re moving into it early, aggressively, and with real capital.
For Barkley, Crusoe offers something bigger than a headline. It’s a stake in the industrial side of the AI revolution. It’s a chance to be part of the companies powering the future, not just promoting them. It’s the kind of move an athlete makes when he understands that fame is temporary, but equity—especially in the right company—can outlast a career.
Most investors get into tech by betting on the shiny things. Barkley skipped the shiny things and went straight for the engine.
Not bad for a guy who’s used to breaking tackles. This time, he broke into a different kind of field—and found a lane no linebacker can touch.
