The insatiable demand for power by artificial intelligence firms is benefiting Bitcoin miners. Hut 8 (NASDAQ:HUT) shares outperformed most peers on Monday after the Miami-based company received a $150 million investment from Coatue Management to develop AI infrastructure.
This investment will be provided through convertible notes with an 8% annual interest rate and a conversion rate of $16.395 per share, as stated by the company. Following the announcement, Hut 8 shares rose nearly 4% during Monday morning trading, even as most of its peers followed Bitcoin (BTC) lower.
The investment also positively impacted other Bitcoin mining-related data centers involved in AI and high-performance computing. Soluna Holdings (NASDAQ:SLNH) surged almost 17%, and Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) gained about 10%.
AI and HPC firms are increasingly turning to the Bitcoin mining industry to fulfill their computing power needs. These miners often already possess the required computing capacity and established deals with power suppliers. JPMorgan highlighted that the demand for power by large-scale data centers and AI firms might spark a new era of mergers and acquisitions for Bitcoin miners with favorable power contracts.
Recently, cloud computing provider CoreWeave signed a 200-megawatt deal with miner Core Scientific (NASDAQ:CORZ) for AI-related services and offered to purchase the entire company for over $1 billion. Core Scientific rejected the offer, citing that it undervalued the company.
Coatue Management, an investor in CoreWeave, underscores the high level of interest in utilizing Bitcoin miners’ existing infrastructure for AI services.
Hut 8 emphasized this need for power in their press release, stating, “Many traditional data center operators are failing to meet the surging demand for AI compute capacity due to power shortages, long lead times to bring new capacity online, and the extensive upgrades required for existing data centers to support the latest generation of high-density compute.” Hut 8 aims to help bridge this gap.
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