This Company Won Big With Bitcoin and AI. Why It’s Now Favoring One Over the Other
3 min
Austin, Texas, company Core Scientific went from bankruptcy to stock market darling this year by betting on two technologies: Bitcoin mining and AI data centers. Shares are up 400%.
But if given the choice of whether to invest more in one business over the other, executives answer without hesitating: the data centers.
“We really just value long-term, stable cash flows and predictable returns,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Brown said in an interview. The company began life as a Bitcoin miner. Even though Bitcoin has been a great asset lately, it’s very volatile. By comparison, Core Scientific can earn steady profits for years by hosting servers owned by companies that sell cloud services to AI providers, Brown said.
This year, you couldn’t go wrong betting on either. Bitcoin is up 116%, and data centers are in high demand because tech companies need them to power their AI applications.
The two technologies seem to have little in common, but they both depend on the same thing: access to reliable power. Core Scientific has a lot of it, operating nine grid-connected warehouses in six states with access to so much electricity they could serve several hundred thousand homes. Other Bitcoin miners have similarly transitioned to data center hosting , but few with quite so much success.
Core Scientific’s business didn’t look quite so good at the start of the year. The company started 2024 under the shadow of bankruptcy protection. It had too much debt on its balance sheet after going public through the SPAC process in 2022 and succumbed to a Bitcoin price crash. But the company’s fortunes quickly turned around after it emerged from bankruptcy on Jan. 23 with $400 million less debt.
The company started the year focused entirely on crypto mining, but quickly pivoted as it saw demand surge for electricity for AI data centers.
In June, the company signed a deal with a company called Coreweave to lease data center space for AI cloud services. Coreweave has since agreed to lease 500 megawatts worth of space. Core Scientific says it will get paid $8.7 billion over 12 years under the deal.
Privately held Coreweave is one of the fastest-growing companies behind the AI revolution. It was once a cryptocurrency miner, but has since transitioned to offering cloud services, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. It’s closely connected to Nvidia , which has invested money in Coreweave and given the company access to its top-end chips. Coreweave expects to be one of the first customers for Nvidia ’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs.
Core Scientific’s quick success in this new world has surprised even the people who are driving it.
“Every once in a while I need to pinch myself, to see I’m actually not dreaming,” Brown said.
Core Scientific’s success does create a high bar for the stock to keep rising. The company is expected to lose money this year, largely because of a change in the value of stock warrants—an accounting shift that doesn’t reflect underlying earnings. Analysts see the company becoming profitable in 2025, when more of its data center deals start to hit the bottom line. They see EPS jumping tenfold by 2027. Shares trade at about 13 times those 2027 estimates.
The data center opportunity should only grow from here, as tech companies build more powerful AI systems. Of the 1,200 megawatts worth of gross power capacity Core Scientific has contracted, about 800 megawatts are going to data center computing deals and 400 megawatts toward Bitcoin mining.
Brown said the company has good relationships with its power suppliers and can potentially add more capacity without having to buy more real estate. It expects to be able to secure about 300 more megawatts worth of power at existing sites, perhaps by the end of the year.
It’s also in the hunt for new sites, including at “distressed” conventional data centers that have lost their tenants. Core Scientific has figured out how to quickly spiff up bare-bones data centers and turn them into high-tech sites with resources like liquid cooling equipment and much higher levels of electricity.
A single server rack in a standard data center might need 6 or 7 kilowatts of power. A high-performance data center can use as much as 130 kilowatts per rack; Core Scientific is working on increasing capacity to 400 kilowatts. The company likens the process of upgrading the warehouses to turning a ho-hum passenger vehicle into a Formula One racing car.
Core Scientific’s transformation from a broken-down jalopy to a hot rod has been a wild story. Its fate next year will depend on just how quickly the AI revolution unfolds.
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
The budget has changed the settings. It has not changed the fundamentals.
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