nergy has become the hot commodity in the artificial intelligence world. Take cloud computing provider CoreWeave, which earlier this month inked a $3.5 billion deal with Core Scientific. The agreement involves CoreWeave paying $290 million annually over 12 years for the Austin-based bitcoin miner’s data centers to host AI-related computing hardware. CoreWeave will also cover all capital expenditures.
The deal was so good that Core Scientific’s stock doubled to $10 in early June, leading some observers to view the company as the new “picks and shovels” play for AI. On June 26, CoreWeave announced a second contract, this one projected to bring Core Scientific $1.2 billion in revenue in the coming years. Core Scientific emerged from bankruptcy in January and is one of the largest bitcoin miners in North America.
The soaring demand for heavy-duty computer capacity, driven by AI applications such as ChatGPT—its queries require 10 times the electricity of traditional Google searches—is putting a premium on companies like Core Scientific that have access to cheap power in states such as Texas and North Dakota and agreements to tap more energy from elsewhere. Having sufficient power available now is vital when you consider that building high-performance computing (HPC) data centers from scratch typically takes 3-5 years, with current wait times for electrical-grid connections stretching up to six, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research center.
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs hit a rough patch on May 29, snapping their impressive 10-day inflow streak as investors took a step back amid fresh uncertainty around Donald Trump’s trade policy following conflicting court decisions.
