The power questions at the heart of the AI-energy nexus are often binary — grid-tied or off-grid, gas or renewables, pure scale or flexibility. This week’s news brought us two new options to consider: buy crypto mining operations and convert them to AI data centers, or propose a wildly outsized data center campus designed explicitly to flatter the current president. The Mount Rushmore of data centers, if you will.
CoreWeave, an Ethereum miner turned AI data center company (and near-meme stock of late), tried to buy high-density computing company Core Scientific last year for around $1 billion, but was rebuffed. It was a gutsy rejection, but one that paid off when CoreWeave came back a year later.
On Monday, CoreWeave announced they are paying roughly $9 billion for Core Scientific in an all-stock deal. CoreWeave had already been leasing Core Scientific’s AI HPC infrastructure as part of an expansion plan, and the acquisition has the benefit of taking nearly $10 billion worth of those leases off its balance sheet.
Core Scientific, originally a bitcoin mining operation, went bankrupt in 2022. But it transformed itself in the process, emerging with a new focus: taking advantage of existing data center infrastructure — with power, cooling, fiber connections, etc., —- and transitioning to focus on AI workloads.
Today, the company has data centers in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas, and with this acquisition CoreWeave gains rapid access to scale and secured power.. According to the announcement, Core Scientific is providing CoreWeave with 1.3 gigawatts of existing power capacity, with an additional incremental 1 GW or more of potential gross power available.
The news brought back to light a topic that was particularly hot in late 2024: bitcoin mining operations as a high-value conversion opportunity for AI workloads. Besides Core Scientific, Hive Digital Technologies, Northern Data, Applied Digital, Iris Energy, Mawson Infrastructure and others have also all repurposed their facilities for AI.
And Crusoe, known today for its participation in the Stargate data center, was also a bitcoin mining operation early on. It’s a bit different from these other examples in that incorporating power generation was always part of Crusoe’s business model, from using flared gas for generation at wellheads, to adopting fossil gas in other contexts at its newer facilities.
This isn’t an easy conversion. Crypto infrastructure is typically not at the level of reliability, security, advanced cooling, power management, and performance required by hyperscalers for AI. But simply starting from a position of having power is a compelling advantage today. The economics of AI continue to be more promising than Bitcoin, despite the currency’s recent highs, so for many crypto miners with infrastructure assets suitable for AI facilities, this trend will likely have lasting momentum.
The bigger the better?
But the former energy secretary and Texas Governor Rick Perry, though not exactly a tech titan, has another idea.
In any hot tech market (or bubble), there’s a period of growth characterized by fierce competition, with outsiders coming in and looking to develop the largest and most brag-worthy solution. As of this week, the prize of biggest announced project has a clear winner: Fermi America, co-founded by Perry and his son Griffin Perry, along with investor Toby Neugebauer.
The company recently announced plans to build an 18 million square-foot data center campus, named either the “Amarillo Hypergrid” or the “Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus,” depending on your source. The campus, near Amarillo, Texas, will one day host 11 GW of primarily behind-the-meter energy infrastructure, powered by solar, gas, and nuclear.
Fermi has partnered with Texas Tech University and will develop a research facility on the campus, along with academic programs. Fermi claims they have already secured 600 megawatts of gas generation equipment from Siemens and GE, and plans to bring one GW of power online by the end of 2026. By 2032, Fermi intends several nuclear facilities, supplied by Westinghouse, to provide four GW of power to the campus. According to reporting from the Washington Post, the nuclear reactors will each go by the name Trump.
In a market desperate for access to power and scale, the plan appears to be proof of at least three things: 1) AI data centers have unquestionably brought nuclear back to the U.S., 2) hubris is alive and well, and 3) Rick Perry knows as well as anyone how to make sure his ideas, and permit applications, get the right attention.
A version of this story was published in the AI-Energy Nexus newsletter on July 9. Subscribe to get pieces like this — plus expert analysis, original reporting, and curated resources — in your inbox every Wednesday.
