Data Centres & Cloud
You need physical buildings stuffed with chips, cooled constantly, and connected to the internet at enormous speed. This is the real estate of the AI economy.
If chips are the brains, data centres are the bodies. Tens of thousands of GPUs racked together, cooled with water or refrigerant, wired up with optical fibre and watched over by a small army of engineers. The hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) built the first wave. A new generation of AI native operators is building the second. And a surprising number of buildings were originally built to mine Bitcoin.
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet
Own the biggest data centres on earth through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. They rent compute power to everyone else.
CoreWeave
A newer data centre company built specifically for AI workloads. Rents NVIDIA GPUs at scale to anyone who needs them.
Core Scientific, IREN, Applied Digital, Cipher Mining
Started as crypto miners. Already own the buildings, power contracts, and cooling systems. Now pivoting to rent that infrastructure to AI companies.
Why are crypto miners relevant to AI?
Pure coincidence of infrastructure. Bitcoin and Ethereum mining requires cheap electricity, large buildings, and lots of cooling, which is exactly what AI data centres need. When crypto revenues collapsed, miners were left with sunk cost infrastructure sitting idle. Rather than write it off, the smart ones pivoted to renting that same infrastructure to AI companies. Core Scientific, IREN, Applied Digital, and Cipher Mining are all playing this transition.