By Manya Saini and Pritam Biswas
(Reuters) -CoreWeave will buy crypto miner Core Scientific in an all-stock deal valued at about $9 billion, it said on Monday, as AI infrastructure firms race to secure the energy and data center capacity needed to power surging demand.
Bitcoin miners’ energy-intensive sites and power contracts, built during the crypto boom, have emerged as prime targets for AI companies expanding their computing infrastructure.
The deal will help in the immediate elimination of more than $10 billion of cumulative future lease overhead to be paid for existing contractual sites over the next 12 years, CoreWeave said.
The offer values Core Scientific at $20.40 per share, representing a premium of around 66% to the stock’s closing price before reports of deal talks surfaced in late June.
Core Scientific’s shares fell 22% in morning trading, while Nvidia-backed CoreWeave was last down 4.5%.
Core Scientific stockholders will receive 0.1235 newly issued CoreWeave stock for each share they hold.
“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC (high-performance computing) workloads at scale,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator.
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, and the final price will be determined at that time.
PIVOT GATHERS PACE
Bitcoin miners have tapped into the AI boom to diversify beyond cryptocurrency, leasing power and data center space to meet soaring demand from AI workloads.
The acquisition is expected to set the bar for bitcoin miners looking to pivot to AI, Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani told Reuters, adding that power remains the biggest constraint for AI data center expansion.
“CoreWeave gets full control of Core Scientific’s entire 1.3 GW power contracted and future pipeline,” Chhugani said.
Founded as an Ethereum-focused crypto miner in 2017, CoreWeave pivoted to AI a few years later. It shuttered its mining business after “The Merge”, Ethereum’s 2022 upgrade, slashed rewards for miners.
CoreWeave’s revenue has grown at breakneck speed, climbing more than eight-fold last year, according to its IPO prospectus.
The deal also marks a turnaround for Core Scientific, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2022 following a sharp drop in bitcoin prices and soaring energy costs.
The company emerged from bankruptcy in early 2024 and, like several other bitcoin miners, has looked to lean on the AI boom to power growth.
Core Scientific first received an unsolicited, non-binding takeover offer from CoreWeave in June 2024. At the time, the company rejected the offer, saying it was significantly undervalued.
The two companies later signed a series of 12-year contracts, including one under which Core Scientific agreed to provide CoreWeave with about 200 MW of infrastructure to power its high-performance computing services.
CoreWeave, which provides access to data centers and Nvidia-powered AI chips, has a market value of about $79 billion, according to LSEG data.
Goldman Sachs is CoreWeave’s adviser, while Moelis and PJT Partners are the financial advisers to Core Scientific.
(Reporting by Manya Saini and Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
