AI is buying bitcoin miners' power, but the contracts decide who gets paid
Bitcoin miners spent years chasing cheap electricity and grid connections. AI developers now want those connections so badly that ageing mines have become valuable property, but the contracts behind the conversions show the owner of the megawatts is often the last to get paid.
SWI Group took control of Genesis Digital Assets this year and announced an €800 million capital increase on 12 October to expand its AI infrastructure business, followed two weeks later by the launch of SWI Compute with roughly $1 billion in NVIDIA equipment orders. SWI's June announcement described land with more than 1.3 GW of energised and approved connections across 15 facilities, while its half-year results in September cited approximately 1.2 GW of secured grid connections. The disclosures do not reconcile the two figures or break down how much capacity is usable today, according to Token Times.
Core Scientific's agreements with AI cloud provider CoreWeave show where the money goes. Most sites start at a base license fee of $100 per kilowatt per month, rising 3.5% a year, with CoreWeave funding or reimbursing approved construction costs and receiving credits against future fees worth up to $1.5 million per MW. At one megawatt, a 50% construction credit cuts a $100,000 monthly base fee to $50,000, so the customer effectively pays for the data centre to be built and then recovers it through lower rent.
The miner carries the rest. Core Scientific recorded $954.2 million of capital expenditure in the first half of 2026, including $180.9 million funded by CoreWeave, and in May a financing subsidiary issued $3.3 billion of secured notes at 7.75% — about $255.8 million in annual coupon costs on the original principal before repayments. Late-delivery credits run at $20,000 a day and then $30,000 in specified circumstances, and some delays give CoreWeave a right to terminate an order.
The conversion itself is costly. CoinShares estimated in its September mining report that turning mining infrastructure into AI-grade facilities costs roughly $8 million to $15 million per MW, against $700,000 to $1 million per MW for conventional mining infrastructure. Core Scientific wrote down $266.5 million of mining equipment and infrastructure in the first quarter, while its colocation business reported $136.7 million of revenue in the second quarter with 437 MW billing customers by mid-July — $35.1 million of which was power charges passed through, adding revenue without gross profit. Electricity draws the customers in, but the contracts determine who gets paid.
