Core Scientific accelerates crypto-to-AI pivot, converts Bitcoin mine to gigawatt-scale token farm
They were doing it in Texas...
Core Scientific is trading coins for tokens, revealing plans on Monday to convert a 300-megawatt bitcoin mining operation in Pecos, Texas, to an 1.5 gigawatt AI datacenter campus.
Core Scientific is one of several companies racing to switch from crypto mining to token farming before the bubble bursts, and recently announced plans to sell $3.3 billion of junk bonds to help facilitate the move. CoreWeave, which has previously contracted with Core Scientific to use capacity at its datacenter in Denton, Texas, and Crusoe are two of the most recognizable converts in the field.
The bitcoin miner turned AI bit barn builder began construction of the new facility earlier this year, with the first new data hall expected to come online in early 2027.
When complete, Core Scientific estimates that the facility will offer about a gigawatt of leasable capacity, roughly the equivalent to the output of a large nuclear reactor. But all of that's assuming the company can secure adequate power.
Core Scientific says that it's already secured an additional 300 megawatts of power from the local utility and plans to supplement that with some kind of "scalable behind-the-meter solution."
What exactly that will entail Core Scientific hasn't said. The company certainly wouldn't be the first bit barn builder to embrace on-site power generation to keep the lights on and the GPUs churning out tokens.
Over the past year, all of the major hyperscalers have embraced some kind of non-traditional energy storage or generation tech, some more exotic than others. Google, Oracle, AWS, and others are all betting on small modular reactors (SMRs), tiny nuclear power plants, that can be deployed on site to fuel their AI ambitions.
Meanwhile Meta this week signed an agreement with Overview Energy to beam a gigawatt of solar power down from orbit, just as soon as they can lob the arrays into orbit. But, just like SMRs, that won't happen until at least 2030.
Power constraints have become such a limiting factor that major model builders like AWS, Google, and xAI are now talking about building orbital datacenters. However, the economics of such a deployment remain dubious to say the least.
That leaves technologies like Bloom Energy's fuel-cells tech, which convert hydrogen or natural gas into power, water, and Co2, or portable gas generators like those deployed by xAI's Colossus bit barn as the likely candidates.
We've reached out to Core Scientific for comment on how exactly it intends to power the facility; we'll let you know if we hear back. ®