Crypto miners are reportedly scrambling to boost their revenue by signing contracts with AI developers.
Financial Times (FT) report As of Wednesday (July 17), these miners run vast, powerful computing sites but are struggling to turn a profit due to rising energy costs and declining mining rewards.
Now, miners are looking to capitalize on growing demand for chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used both in their cryptocurrency mining sector and in artificial intelligence (AI) processing, according to the report.
Core ScientificThe company, one of the world’s largest bitcoin miners, is “actively pursuing” AI-related deals, its CEO said. Adam Sullivan He told the FT.
“This is a very important part of the business,” he added.
The company, which has data centers in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, last month signed a deal with AI cloud provider CoreWeave that projects revenue of $4.7 billion over 12 years.
CoreWeave itself was originally a cryptocurrency miner before moving into AI and raising funds in May, boosting its valuation to $19 billion. $7.5 billion In debt financing.
The FT report noted that AI companies require large amounts of energy and computing infrastructure, both of which crypto miners can provide, giving AI companies an advantage over building their own high-performance computing (HPC) data centers.
(Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft Spending billions of dollars Invest in AI data centers. And as PYMNTS argued in April, they will likely Unique AI chip.
“that [normally] “Building an HPC-grade data center from scratch takes three to five years,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a recent FT note, adding that growing demand for AI is making this time frame even longer.
An analysis conducted by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) earlier this year estimated that large-scale cryptocurrency trading in the United States consumes more than 2% of the nation’s electricity, which is roughly Add another state to the national power grid.
Meanwhile, in January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its forecast for global energy use over the next two years, which included estimates for electricity consumption by data centers, cryptocurrencies, and AI.
The IEA said that combined usage would amount to about 2% of global energy demand in 2022, and that this demand could double by 2026 – roughly the same as Japan’s electricity use.
