"One afternoon in June 2024, I stood up against the fence of a sprawling industrial facility a few miles outside of Corsicana, Texas. Over a metal gate, I watched a bright yellow excavator claw at the dirt and flatbed trucks shuttle to and fro. A hangar-like structure with a gleaming white roof stretched hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owned the plot, Riot Platforms, was busily constructing the world's largest bitcoin mine."
"Across the US, an identical pattern is playing out at bitcoin mining facilities owned by a variety of operators. In the last 18 months, at least eight other publicly traded bitcoin mining companies- Bitfarms, Core Scientific, Riot, IREN, TeraWulf, CleanSpark, Bit Digital, MARA Holdings, and Cipher Mining -have announced plans to pivot either partly or wholly to AI. The change reflects rabid demand among AI companies for data centers equipped to handle the energy-intensive workloads required to train their models."
Riot Platforms began building the world's largest bitcoin mine near Corsicana, Texas, but within 18 months two-thirds of the facility is being repurposed for AI and high-performance computing. Several publicly traded bitcoin mining firms have announced partial or full pivots to AI to capture surging demand for energy-intensive model training. Large-scale miners already possess powered shells, electrical capacity, and data-center infrastructure that suit AI workloads, and transitioning lowers their cost of capital. The shift reflects intense competition for compute capacity and forces miners to replace mining rigs with tenants' GPU-based hardware to generate revenue and improve profitability.
Read at WIRED
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]