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Crusoe vs Wafer
Both claim big speedups over stock vLLM, by different routes. Wafer tunes each stack with agents; Crusoe shares KV cache across its whole cluster.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Crusoe vs Wafer: key differences
Crusoe and Wafer each argue that stock serving engines leave speed on the table, and each benchmarks against them with its own numbers. Crusoe's MemoryAlloy shares KV cache across the cluster with cache-aware routing, and Crusoe claims up to 9.9x faster time to first token and 5x throughput versus vLLM on prefix-heavy work. Wafer uses AI agents that profile a workload, try configs across batching, decoding, quantization, kernels and hardware, then deploy the winner and keep re-tuning. Wafer reports its Qwen 3.5 397B 2.8x faster than stock SGLang, and GLM 5.1 and DeepSeek V4 Pro each 2x faster than vLLM. Neither set of figures is independent, so buyers should test their own traffic.
Pricing and scale are far apart. Wafer Pass is a flat-rate subscription from $10 a week covering every hosted model, built to drop into Claude Code, Cline and OpenHands, which suits individual developers. Crusoe bills per token from $0.05 in and $0.20 out, or per GPU-hour on dedicated deployments. Wafer is a young YC company with a small hosted catalog, though it runs on NVIDIA and AMD. Crusoe owns its data centers, offers managed LoRA fine-tuning, tailored SLAs and GB200, B200 and MI355X clusters. Wafer's dedicated endpoints are tuned to a customer's SLO, which helps teams without kernel engineers.
What Crusoe and Wafer 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 profileWafer
Wafer builds AI agents that act as GPU performance engineers, then sells inference on the stacks those agents tune. The company came out of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch as a "Cursor for CUDA" that turned slow PyTorch into custom kernels. Founders Emilio Andere and Steven Arellano are based in San Francisco. Its agents profile a workload, generate candidate configs across batching, decoding, quantization, engines, kernels and hardware, measure each one and deploy the winner.
Example models: Qwen 3.5 397B Turbo, GLM 5.1 Turbo
Full Wafer profileShould you choose Crusoe or Wafer?
Crusoe vs Wafer at a glance
| Attribute | Crusoe | Wafer |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Open weights |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.3, Kimi K2.6, Nemotron 3 | Qwen 3.5 397B Turbo, GLM 5.1 Turbo |
| Speed | Up to 9.9x faster TTFT vs vLLM (vendor claim) | 2–2.8x vs stock vLLM or SGLang |
| Price | $0.05–$1.74 in, $0.20–$4.40 out per 1M | Wafer Pass from $10 a week |
| Customization | Serverless LoRA fine-tuning | Agent-tuned dedicated deployments |
| Deployment | Serverless, self-serve and tailored dedicated, raw GPUs | Serverless pass, dedicated |
| Long context | Varies by model; cluster-wide KV cache | Varies by model |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Crusoe and Wafer?
Both claim big speedups over stock vLLM, by different routes. Wafer tunes each stack with agents; Crusoe shares KV cache across its whole cluster.
When should I choose Crusoe over Wafer?
Enterprise capacity with tailored SLAs; Workloads with heavy prefix reuse; Fine-tuning plus large GPU clusters.
When should I choose Wafer over Crusoe?
Flat-rate open models inside coding agents; Dedicated endpoints tuned to a latency SLO; Big open models at interactive speed.
Is Crusoe or Wafer cheaper?
Crusoe: $0.05–$1.74 in, $0.20–$4.40 out per 1M. Wafer: Wafer Pass from $10 a week. The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, Crusoe or Wafer?
Crusoe: Varies by model; cluster-wide KV cache. Wafer: Varies by model.
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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.