Matt Brown figures he must have been one of the most sought-after attendees at a technology conference hosted by Nvidia this spring.
The artificial intelligence boom has created an unprecedented shortage of both data-centre space and the graphics-processing unit chips used in AI, as well as quick access to enough electricity to power it all. “We view the opportunity in AI today to be one where we can convert existing infrastructure we own to host clients who are looking to install very large arrays of GPUs for their clients that are ultimately AI clients,” Core Scientific chief executive officer Adam Sullivan said in an interview before the news of CoreWeave’s offer broke.
If a data-centre developer can secure a power source with a two-year time advantage relative to a competitor, the developer would be willing to pay about a 101% premium to power prices, assuming a six-year economic life of the GPUs, according to an estimate from Morgan Stanley.
While some crypto miners trying to ride the AI boom are hunting for more convertible data centers and readily available power to rent out to AI firms, some are taking a more direct approach by purchasing specialized hardware and selling computing power directly to AI clients. About 70% of the German crypto miner’s operation, including A100 chips that are predecessors to H100, was used for mining the cryptocurrency Ether until that token’s blockchain underwent a major software update that rendered the chips useless for that purpose.