AI Boom Lures Miner Out of Michigan Site with Billion-Dollar Deal
Hyperscale Data, a data center company, has shut down its Bitcoin mining operations at a Michigan site to accommodate an unnamed AI customer. The customer is from California and will use 20 megawatts of capacity for cloud computing services. This deal could generate more than $1.2 billion over 20 years if the customer exercises both five-year extensions.
The company plans to sell its mining servers and expects gains from those sales. Hyperscale's CEO, William Horne, believes that as the facility expands to support AI computing infrastructure, the company's stockholders will be rewarded. The market capitalization of Hyperscale is currently lower than other data center companies.
This move follows a trend among miners converting sites to serve AI customers. VanEck's head of digital asset research, Matthew Sigel, argued in March that miners are 'sitting on a gold mine' and could profit from repurposing their infrastructure as demand for AI computing grows. However, this shift can be costly, as evident in IREN's quarterly results released last month.