In March, the AI data center company CoreWeave went public, and its share price quadrupled amid the broader artificial intelligence boom. But AI wasn’t always the company’s focus. It started in 2016 as a specialist in crypto mining—a term for using computers to process transactions and secure a cryptocurrency’s network. Amid crypto’s volatile ups and downs, CoreWeave shifted its business to AI in 2019.
Amid the tightening sector, other Bitcoin mining operations have also lent their data warehouses out to AI companies, which require large amounts of computing power for tasks such as training large language models. Still, Core Scientific’s pivot underlines the increasingly clear roadmap for Bitcoin miners: dedicate warehouses once reserved for Bitcoin mining servers to servers designed for AI. “It kind of reinforces the thesis that there is probably some shortage when it comes to power,” Brett Knoblauch, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, told Fortune, in reference to AI companies’ hunger for computing power.
That hunger for power has AI specialists like CoreWeave looking to build out its fleets of computers to account for rising demand. “The only place where you can get power and size is the miners,” said Knoblauch.
“Pivoting to HPC compute has been a key theme among BTC Miners with strong energy asset portfolios,” Brian Dobson, an analyst at Clear Street, told Fortune. (HPC refers to high-performance computing, a catch-all term that includes AI.)
Hyperscalers tend to conduct due diligence on their vendors for longer periods than more nimble upstarts like CoreWeave, he said. And companies like Google or Amazon may be skeptical of Bitcoin miners’ ability to convert their simpler facilities into more sophisticated AI data centers, he added. Now that CoreWeave, one of the few firms taking chances on miners, has committed to Core Scientific, it may be more difficult for Bitcoin mining operations to replicate Core Scientific’s success.
Still, Knoblauch is optimistic that miners, who have built businesses on finding and using cheap electricity to power warehouses of servers, can still ride the energy-intensive AI boom. “Miners are relatively unique in that they are experts when it comes to power,” he said. “And they have a lot of it.”
