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Crusoe vs Inception
Crusoe is an AI cloud that serves open models on a cluster-wide KV cache and rents raw GPUs. Inception sells its own diffusion LLMs built for fast output.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Crusoe vs Inception: key differences
Crusoe's serverless catalog covers DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Gemma, gpt-oss and Nemotron from $0.05 in and $0.20 out, with LoRA fine-tuning, dedicated deployments and GB200 or B200 clusters. Its MemoryAlloy cache reuses prefixes across nodes, and it claims up to 9.9x faster time to first token than vLLM on prefix-heavy work. Inception's Mercury 2.5 is a closed reasoning model with 260K context, tool use and JSON mode at $0.20 in and $0.75 out per million. Inception reports over 1,100 tokens per second, and Artificial Analysis measured about 640.
Crusoe fits teams that want open models, fine-tuning and their own GPU capacity from one account, especially for agents that resend long context. Inception fits latency-critical steps where Mercury's quality is enough. Crusoe's speed figures are its own benchmarks, while Inception's claim has an outside measurement that comes in lower.
What Crusoe and Inception 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
Inception
Inception builds diffusion large language models (dLLMs). Every other LLM on this list generates text one token at a time; Inception's Mercury models start from a rough draft of a whole block and refine it over a few passes, producing many tokens in parallel. That ties speed less to output length and lets the models run fast on ordinary NVIDIA GPUs rather than custom chips. The company was founded by professors from Stanford, UCLA and Cornell behind core work on diffusion, Flash Attention and DPO, and is led by Stanford's Stefano Ermon. It raised a $50M seed in November 2025 led by Menlo Ventures, with Mayfield, M12, NVentures, Snowflake and Databricks, plus Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy as angels.
Example models: Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2
Full Inception profileShould you choose Crusoe or Inception?
Crusoe vs Inception at a glance
| Attribute | Crusoe |  Inception |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Closed weights (Mercury dLLMs) |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.3, Kimi K2.6, Nemotron 3 | Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2 |
| Speed | Up to 9.9x faster TTFT vs vLLM (vendor claim) | 1,100+ tok/s (vendor); ~640 measured |
| Price | $0.05–$1.74 in, $0.20–$4.40 out per 1M | $0.20 in, $0.75 out (Mercury 2.5) |
| Customization | Serverless LoRA fine-tuning | Fine-tuning on request |
| Deployment | Serverless, self-serve and tailored dedicated, raw GPUs | Serverless API, Bedrock, Azure, private |
| Long context | Varies by model; cluster-wide KV cache | 260K |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Crusoe and Inception?
Crusoe is an AI cloud that serves open models on a cluster-wide KV cache and rents raw GPUs. Inception sells its own diffusion LLMs built for fast output.
When should I choose Crusoe over Inception?
Agents that resend long, repeated context; Fine-tuning and serving open models in one place; Large GB200 and B200 clusters.
When should I choose Inception over Crusoe?
Fast output for code edits and voice; Low-cost reasoning with tool use; Buying through Bedrock or Azure.
Is Crusoe or Inception cheaper?
Crusoe: $0.05–$1.74 in, $0.20–$4.40 out per 1M. Inception: $0.20 in, $0.75 out (Mercury 2.5). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, Crusoe or Inception?
Crusoe: Varies by model; cluster-wide KV cache. Inception: 260K.
Related comparisons
Running long-horizon agents?
If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious. Our inference stack treats a long-horizon trace as the primary workload, so speed, cost, and accuracy hold up deep into the trace.