Bitcoin mining has been known as the "electricity-consuming monster" in the past few years. However, with the advent of the AI wave, the electricity required for mining has gradually been taken over by AI data centers. Bitcoin miners with large amounts of power and computing resources are transforming into high-performance computing (HPC) and AI computing hosting centers that provide power and computing resources to AI data centers.

Tech company Lancium and one of the largest bitcoin mining companies in the United States, Crusoe Energy Systems, which is known as a "promising company" by Musk, announced Thursday morning that they have reached a multi-billion dollar deal to build a 200 megawatt data center in Houston, Texas, USA, to meet the high-end cloud computing needs of AI companies in areas such as medical research and aircraft design.

According to media reports, this is just the first phase of a larger 1.2-gigawatt data center construction plan. Ali Fenn, CEO of Lancium, told the media that when running at full capacity, it will become one of the world's largest AI data center parks.

"Data centers are evolving rapidly to support modern AI workloads. They require new high-density rack space, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and unprecedented overall energy demand", said Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe.

Crusoe: AI transformation was planned

Crusoe is one of the most representative companies in the bitcoin mining industry, whose technology helps oil companies convert wasted energy or flare gas into useful resources. According to media reports, many bitcoin miners use machines set up near these sites with the help of Crusoe to take advantage of this cheaper power source. For example, in 2021, ExxonMobil partnered with Crusoe to mine bitcoin in North Dakota.

However, according to Lochmiller, the infrastructure for artificial intelligence was actually part of the company's vision when it was founded six years ago.

"We reimagined the AI infrastructure from the ground up - from our energy solutions, to the design, engineering, and construction of our purpose-built AI data centers, to our manufacturing capabilities for critical electrical data center infrastructure, to our dedicated AI compute stack," said Lochmiller.

"Our power orchestration technology ensures that large AI data center parks can be an asset to the grid, rather than a burden."

In addition, Lancium has patented technology that can convert the energy buyer's needs into dial-up adjustments that can be made in five seconds. This helps balance the power grid that relies on inherently fluctuating energy sources such as wind and solar energy. Fenn said:"Lancium's initial vision was to bring large loads to locations with the best and richest renewable energy to promote energy transformation."

However, in 2018, the only load that was suitable for this vision was bitcoin mining, because one of bitcoin's biggest features is that it is not limited by location. Miners only need power and an internet connection, unlike other industries that must be relatively close to their end users.

Now, Lancium's strategy has shifted toward artificial intelligence. Fenn said,"Traditional data centers mainly optimize for proximity to urban areas and users. Now, everything has changed. AI data centers optimize for large-scale energy supply, cost, and green energy. Our vision, park, and technology are perfect for this much larger, expanded opportunity."

The trend of mining farms transitioning to AI has emerged.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously revealed that a "promising company" was helping Oracle establish an Nvidia GB200 chip cluster for OpenAI in response to the news of his X.AI company's failed cooperation with Oracle.

Later, media reports confirmed that the "promising company" was indeed Crusoe. The company is close to reaching an agreement with Oracle to establish a data center in Abilene, Texas, and deploy Nvidia chips in the data center. Crusoe Energy will operate the data center. Finally, Microsoft will rent these computing resources deployed in this data center and provide them to OpenAI for AI development.

More and more bitcoin miners have joined this transformation track. In addition to Crusoe, Bit Digital, a bitcoin mine, is also one of them. It is said that 27% of its revenue comes from artificial intelligence. The company announced in June that it has signed an agreement with a client to provide Nvidia GPUs in data centers in Iceland for three years, generating an estimated $92 million in revenue annually. Part of the payment comes from realizing its cryptocurrency holdings.

Meanwhile, Miami-based mine Hut 8 announced it had raised $150 million in debt from private equity firm Coatue to develop its portfolio of artificial intelligence data centers.

The artificial intelligence transformation of mine Core Scientific has been particularly successful, allowing the company to avoid bankruptcy in January. Earlier, Core Scientific announced a 12-year agreement with Nvidia's 'progeny' and cloud computing service provider CoreWeave to provide up to 200 megawatts of electrical utilities for CoreWeave's GPUs. Core Scientific expects the deal to generate $3.5 billion in revenue for the company during the contract period. Additionally, CoreWeave has proposed to acquire Core Scientific at $5.75 per share. This is the world's largest bitcoin custody transaction to date.

The total market value of the 14 major US-listed bitcoin miners tracked by JPMorgan hit a historical high of $228 billion on June 15, up $4.4 billion in two weeks.