Bitcoin miners sink millions into AI businesses, seeking billions in return

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AUSTIN — For five years, bitcoin miner Core Scientific has quietly been diversifying out of mining and into artificial intelligence, a market that will require immense amounts of power to handle the training of AI models and the massive workloads that follow.

The move is no longer a secret.

On Monday, Core Scientific announced a 12-year deal with cloud provider CoreWeave to provide infrastructure for use cases like machine learning. Core Scientific said the agreement, which expands upon an existing partnership between the two companies, will add revenue of more than $3.5 billion over the course of the contract.

CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, rents out graphics processing units (GPUs), which are needed for training and running AI models. CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion in a funding round last month. Core Scientific will deliver about 200 megawatts of infrastructure to CoreWeave's operations.

Core Scientific, which emerged from bankruptcy in January, has been mining a mix of digital assets since 2017. The company began to diversify into other services in 2019.

"The best way to think about bitcoin mining facilities is that we are essentially power shells to the data center industry," Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan told CNBC.

Sullivan jumped into the role of CEO while the company was still in the throes of bankruptcy, which resulted from the collapse of bitcoin in 2022. Since then, the former investment banker has settled debts with angry lenders and further beefed up the company's non-bitcoin business as it reentered the public market.

Though Core is up more than 40% since relisting earlier this year, its market capitalization of around $865 million is significantly lower than its