Miners in Texas switch focus from crypto to the next big thing

Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot announced that his company has secured commercial agreements for a new AI vertical under a GPU-as-a-service model, with a customer agreement that includes fixed infrastructure payments and revenue sharing. Core Scientific, which emerged from bankruptcy in January, has been successful in its pivot to AI, recently striking deals with CoreWeave, a key provider of Nvidia’s technology for running AI models. CoreWeave offered to acquire Core Scientific for $1.02 billion, but the bid was rejected. Crusoe, known for helping oil companies convert wasted energy into a resource, has been instrumental in the bitcoin mining industry. The company is now shifting to AI infrastructure, with a facility in Abilene expected to go live in 2025, drawing primarily from renewable energy sources. Lancium, another company in the AI and energy space, utilizes patented technology to balance power grids with volatile energy sources like wind and solar power. Bitcoin miners are known for being flexible electricity consumers, even able to power down with a few seconds’ notice. Analysis projects large publicly traded bitcoin miners to double power capacity in the next one to two years. The Electric Power Research Institute estimates that data centers could consume up to 9% of the country’s electricity by 2030, with nuclear energy seen as a solution. TeraWulf, which powers its mining sites with nuclear energy, is looking to expand into machine learning. OpenAI’s CEO also supports nuclear energy as a key component in meeting the energy demands of AI workloads.

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