GPU cloud provider CoreWeave has leased 16MW of data center space from Bitcoin mining and digital infrastructure provider Core Scientific.
The multi-year contract could be worth up to $100 million, the companies said.
The data center in question is Core Scientific's newly acquired facility in Austin, Texas. The site was formerly used to house Hewlett Packard's hosting business, including high-performance computing.
According to Adam Sullivan, Core Scientific CEO, the Austin facility will be used for both Bitcoin mining and "specialized GPU cloud compute."
Michael Intrator, CoreWeave CEO, said: “Our strong business relationship with Core Scientific is based on years of demonstrated responsiveness, high uptime data centers, professionalism, and trust. Both companies share a core belief in accelerating innovation, which our collaboration will help to achieve in rapidly growing applications in AI and high-performance computing.”
Core Scientific has more than 300MW of operational data center infrastructure in the US. This is spread across seven data centers in five states: Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas. At full build-out, those sites have a combined potential capacity of 724MW.
The two companies have collaborated in the past, with Core Scientific hosting CoreWeave's GPU hardware in its data centers between 2019 and 2022.
Core Scientific had a challenging 2022, with an SEC filing from October that year stating that the company could not pay its debts and would be out of cash by the end of the year. In December 2022, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and its share price fell by 98 percent.
In January 2024, the company won court approval to exit bankruptcy and implemented a restructuring plan that would cut around $400m in debt from its balance sheet. This has largely been put down to the significant turnaround in Bitcoin prices.
Founded in 2017 and originally focused on crypto and blockchain applications, CoreWeave has been investing heavily in its GPU cloud offering.
In June 2023, the company raised $200m in funding, just one month after previous raise brought in $221m. That month it also signed a deal with Microsoft thought to be worth several billion dollars.
In December 2023, the company sold a minority stake in its business for $624m, and later that month purchased thousands of Dell PowerEdge servers for its cloud.
CoreWave currently offers three data center regions; US East in Weehawken, New Jersey; US West in Las Vegas, Nevada; and US Central in Chicago, Illinois. The company previously said that it expects to operate 14 data centers by the end of 2023.
CoreWeave last year announced $1.6bn plans for a data center at a Lincoln Rackhouse-owned site in Plano, Texas, and is also moving into a Chirisa-owned data center in Chester, Virginia. TierPoint recently signed a long-term agreement with CoreWeave to provide the GPU firm colocation services at one of its data centers, though details weren’t shared. It is also leasing Flexential data centers in Oregon and Georgia
