Core Scientific Signs 15-Year AMD Deal as Its Bitcoin Mining Business Shrinks
Fifteen years. Up to 2.5 gigawatts of power. A bitcoin miner that now makes most of its money from something other than mining bitcoin. Core Scientific just signed one of the largest AI hosting deals in the sector, and it confirms a shift the numbers already showed.
The Deal in Numbers
Core Scientific and AMD have agreed to a 15-year hosting arrangement that starts at 529 megawatts of capacity. AMD holds options to expand that footprint to as much as 2.5 gigawatts by 2028, with customer deployments on the new capacity expected to begin in 2027. Core Scientific estimates the agreement could generate roughly $14 billion in base contracted revenue over its full term.
| Metric | Q2 2026 |
|---|---|
| Total revenue | $164.2 million |
| Colocation (AI hosting) revenue | $136.7 million (83% of total) |
| Self-mining revenue | $21.5 million (down 66% year-over-year) |
| Initial AMD deal capacity | 529 MW, expandable to 2.5 GW by 2028 |
Why a Bitcoin Miner Is Building for AI, Not Mining
Core Scientific built its business running large fleets of ASIC machines to mine bitcoin. That business is now a minority of its revenue. Colocation and hosting services for AI computing already generate five times more revenue than self-mining, and the AMD agreement locks in a long runway for that side of the business to keep growing.
The economics explain the shift. Data center capacity leased to AI compute customers can be contracted for years at predictable rates, while bitcoin mining revenue swings with the network’s difficulty adjustments and the price of bitcoin itself. For a company sitting on power infrastructure and real estate, renting that capacity to AI firms is now the steadier business.
What Happens to Its Mining Business
Core Scientific also terminated its agreement to purchase bitcoin-mining chips from Block, recording a $41.9 million charge tied to that termination. The company has not said it is fully exiting bitcoin mining, but the direction is clear: less capital and capacity going toward new mining hardware, more going toward AI hosting infrastructure that AMD and its customers will occupy starting in 2027.
Core Scientific is not the only miner making this bet. Several bitcoin mining companies have converted or repurposed sites toward AI and high-performance computing over the past two years, as compute demand for AI training has made hosting deals more lucrative, on a per-megawatt basis, than running mining rigs.
What Actually Happens When Bitcoin Is Mined?
Mining is how new bitcoin enters circulation and how the network stays secure. See the full process, step by step, in the Bitcoin Academy.
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