Google has helped strike another deal with a Bitcoin miner. On Thursday, Cipher Mining announced that it was leasing a data warehouse it owns in Colorado City, Texas, to an AI computing startup. The Bitcoin miner projects the contract to net the company $3 billion over its initial 10-year term and $7 billion if two five-year extensions are exercised.
Cipher Mining struck the deal with Fluidstack, an AI computing startup based in the U.K. Google has agreed to backstop $1.4 billion in the startup’s lease obligations, and, in return, receive 5.4% in equity in Cipher Mining.
“We believe this transaction represents the first of several in the HPC space,” Tyler Page, CEO of Cipher Miner, said in a statement, referring to high-performance computing, an industry term that generally refers to AI.
Under the deal, Cipher Mining will repurpose its Bitcoin mining data center in Texas for AI services—and potentially expand its existing campus to accommodate increased demand.
This isn’t the first deal Google has helped broker a deal with a Bitcoin miner. In August, TeraWulf announced that it had struck a $3.7 billion deal to lease out a data center it owns in western New York to Fluidstack. Google agreed to backstop $1.8 billion of the deal and received 8% in TeraWulf equity.
Bitcoin to AI
Google’s tie-ups with Cipher Mining and TeraWulf come as AI developers look to amass more and more computing power to stay competitive in an industry arms race. On Monday, OpenAI announced a plan with the chip developer Nvidia to build AI data centers that would consume as much electricity as the entirety of New York City and San Diego combined.
But AI giants like OpenAI or Google aren’t just tapping established chipmakers. They’re also looking for help from Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin mining refers to the act of solving complex mathematical puzzles to process transactions between holders of the cryptocurrency as well as introduce new Bitcoins into circulation. The largest Bitcoin miners own fleets of specialized computers in large data warehouses to compete for new tranches of the cryptocurrency.
While AI data warehouses have different servers and require different networks, the similarities between mining Bitcoin and powering AI haven’t been lost on crypto companies.
CoreWeave, for example, pivoted from mining the cryptocurrency Ethereum to building out AI data warehouses. Its customers include OpenAI, Google, Cloudflare, and a suite of Big Tech firms. The company went public in March and is worth about $65 billion, as of Thursday afternoon.
Other Bitcoin miners have tried to replicate CoreWeave’s pivot, including Core Scientific, which CoreWeave agreed to acquire in July for $9 billion. Core Scientific shareholders have since pushed back on the deal, arguing that the purchase price undervalues the Bitcoin miner.
