Nvidia-backed CoreWeave to buy crypto miner Core Scientific in $9 billion deal
The acquisition highlights how artificial intelligence companies are moving beyond traditional data centers and looking to repurpose the energy-intensive sites and power contracts bitcoin miners built during the crypto boom.
The deal will help in the immediate elimination of more than $10 billion of cumulative future lease overhead to be paid for existing contractual sites over the next 12 years, CoreWeave said.
The offer represents a $20.40 per share value and implies a premium of nearly 66 per cent to Core Scientific stock's close before reports of potential deal talks first appeared in late June.
Core Scientific's shares fell 15 per cent before the bell, while Nvidia-backed CoreWeave was last down 4 per cent.
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, and the final price will be determined at that time, the companies said.
Founded as an Ethereum-focused crypto miner in 2017, CoreWeave pivoted to AI a few years later. It shuttered its mining business after "The Merge", Ethereum's 2022 upgrade, slashed rewards for miners.
CoreWeave's revenue has grown at breakneck speed, climbing more than eight-fold last year, according to its IPO prospectus.
The deal marks a turnaround for Core Scientific, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2022 following a sharp drop in bitcoin prices and soaring energy costs. The company exited bankruptcy in early 2024.
Core Scientific received an unsolicited non-binding proposal from CoreWeave in June last year to acquire all of the company's outstanding shares.
At the time, Core Scientific had said that the deal significantly undervalued it and was not in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.
The two companies signed a series of 12-year contracts then, including an agreement under which Core Scientific would provide CoreWeave with about 200 MW of infrastructure to power its high-performance computing services.
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