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Crusoe vs Dolphin
Crusoe builds its own data centers and serves open models, with SLAs on tailored deployments. Dolphin serves one open model on idle consumer GPUs owned by others.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Crusoe vs Dolphin: key differences
Crusoe owns the stack from power to GPUs, with serverless inference from $0.05 in and $0.20 out, LoRA fine-tuning, tailored deployments with SLAs and H100s at $3.90 per GPU-hour on demand. Dolphin's API launched in October 2026 with one model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, at $0.01 in and $0.07 out per million, served on idle consumer GPUs. Node operators earn $POD tokens, and Dolphin publishes no speed, context or SLA.
Crusoe suits production workloads, fine-tuning and large clusters. Dolphin suits cheap background calls where latency can vary, and products that need uncensored models. Its wallet and Telegram signup rules it out for most procurement teams.
What Crusoe and Dolphin do
Crusoe
Crusoe started in 2018 turning wasted natural gas into power for computing and has since become a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company: it sources energy, builds data centers and rents GPUs through Crusoe Cloud. It designed and built the Abilene, Texas campus behind the OpenAI and Oracle Stargate project, planned at 1.2 GW, and in March 2026 announced an adjacent 900 MW campus for Microsoft. On September 17, 2026 it closed the first part of a $3.9B Series F at a $30.9B post-money valuation, and it reports over 6 GW of contracted capacity. Crusoe Cloud lists GB200 NVL72, B200 and AMD MI355X by quote, with H100 at $3.90 and H200 at $4.29 per GPU-hour on demand.
Example models: DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM 5.3, Kimi K2.6
Full Crusoe profile
Dolphin
Dolphin began in 2023 as Eric Hartford's series of open-source, uncensored fine-tunes, trained to drop the refusals and baked-in guidelines of their base models so that the developer sets the rules through the system prompt. Current releases include Dolphin Llama 3.1 8B and Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition, built with Venice, and the project publishes nearly 100 models on Hugging Face. It also runs a chat app, a Telegram bot and a synthetic data service that generates answers to commonly refused prompts.
Example models: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B
Full Dolphin profileShould you choose Crusoe or Dolphin?
Crusoe vs Dolphin at a glance
| Attribute | Crusoe |  Dolphin |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Open weights, uncensored fine-tunes |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.3, Kimi K2.6, Nemotron 3 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B |
| Speed | Up to 9.9x faster TTFT vs vLLM (vendor claim) | Unknown |
| Price | $0.05–$1.74 in, $0.20–$4.40 out per 1M | $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
| Customization | Serverless LoRA fine-tuning | Own uncensored fine-tunes |
| Deployment | Serverless, self-serve and tailored dedicated, raw GPUs | Decentralized serverless API |
| Long context | Varies by model; cluster-wide KV cache | Unknown |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Crusoe and Dolphin?
Crusoe builds its own data centers and serves open models, with SLAs on tailored deployments. Dolphin serves one open model on idle consumer GPUs owned by others.
When should I choose Crusoe over Dolphin?
Production inference with SLAs; Fine-tuning and serving in one account; Large GPU clusters.
When should I choose Dolphin over Crusoe?
Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls; Background jobs with loose latency needs; Uncensored models.
Is Crusoe or Dolphin cheaper?
Crusoe: $0.05–$1.74 in, $0.20–$4.40 out per 1M. Dolphin: $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
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