CoreWeave Pays $9 Billion for Bitcoin Miner Core Scientific

CoreWeave is acquiring data center infrastructure provider Core Scientific in a $9 billion deal.

The artificial intelligence (AI) company announced the deal Monday (July 7), saying it helped it “verticalize its data center footprint to future-proof revenue growth and enhance profitability.”

“CoreWeave expects to generate significant cost savings through streamlining business operations and eliminating lease overhead,” the company said in a news release.

The release added that the deal allows CoreWeave to pursue infrastructure financing strategies for capital expenditures, reducing its capital costs. It also gives the company more control over a “critical power footprint” with the option of adding future power capacity.

“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC workloads at scale,” CoreWeave CEO and Co-founder Michael Intrator said in the release.

“Verticalizing the ownership of Core Scientific’s high-performance data center infrastructure enables CoreWeave to significantly enhance operating efficiency and de-risk our future expansion, solidifying our growth trajectory,” Intrator added. “Owning this foundational layer of our platform will enhance our performance and expertise as we continue helping customers unleash AI’s full potential.”

Core Scientific provides infrastructure for bitcoin mining and hosting services. According to a report on the deal by The Wall Street Journal, CoreWeave tried to acquire the company last year for a bit more than $1 billion, a number Core Scientific said was too low.

The deal is happening at a time when AI startup merger and acquisition (M&A) deals have reached record highs in both deal volume and valuation, as PYMNTS wrote Monday.

Samuel Kerr, head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket, told PYMNTS that this is a common trend after a period of maturity in which bigger companies would go after smaller players to absorb their technologies instead of developing their own.

“You’re going to start to have the big winners start to acquire other technologies rather than doing it in-house,” Kerr said. “That’s the natural progression.”

According to Mergermarket data shared with PYMNTS, the value of M&A deals involving AI startups climbed by 288% to $49.9 billion last year compared to 2023. The number of deals rose 53%, to 454. And compared to 2019, the number of deals has increased by 130% while the deal value has jumped by 730%.

And already this year, the deal value has surpassed 2024 by 11%, with companies spending a total $55.3 billion on AI-related M&A between Jan. 1 and July 2.

Among the recent high profile AI deals was Meta’s $14.8 billion purchase of Scale AI, a deal that also involved the tech giant hiring that company’s co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its new superintelligence lab.