Cryptocurrency miners are turning to AI for new revenue streams due to challenges in their traditional operations.
The miners are reportedly using their advanced computing facilities to support artificial intelligence (AI), coping with high energy costs and diminishing returns in cryptocurrency mining.
Core Scientific, Bitcoin’s largest miner, is leading this shift. The company’s CEO, Adam Sullivan, highlighted a significant deal with AI cloud services provider CoreWeave that is expected to generate $4.7 billion over 12 years. CoreWeave, which switched from cryptocurrency mining to AI, achieved a $19 billion valuation in May after raising $7.5 billion in debt financing.
AI companies need significant energy and computing resources, making the existing infrastructure of cryptomining a lucrative option. J.P. Morgan analysts say that building HPC data centers can take 3-5 years until miners’ configurations are ready for use.
High performance computing (HPC) is the ability to process data and perform complex calculations at high speed.
Other miners such as TeraWulf Inc. and Hut 8 Corp. are also expanding into AI, with TeraWulf developing a new HPC project and Hut 8 receiving a $150 million investment to develop AI infrastructure.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has spotlighted a significant acceleration in institutional crypto adoption, driven largely by the surging popularity of exchange-traded funds and increased use of Coinbase Prime among major corporations.
Jefferies chief market strategist David Zervos believes an upcoming power shift at the Federal Reserve could benefit U.S. equity markets.
Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto custody bank, is urging its institutional clients to move away from major stablecoins like USDC, Agora USD (AUSD), and Usual USD (USD0), recommending instead a shift to the Global Dollar (USDG) — a stablecoin issued by Paxos and backed by a consortium that includes Anchorage itself.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has voiced concerns over the rise of zero-knowledge (ZK) digital identity projects, specifically warning that systems like World — formerly Worldcoin and backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman — could undermine pseudonymity in the digital world.