Google has helped strike another deal with a Bitcoin miner. On Thursday, Cipher Mining announced that it was leasing a data warehouse it owns in Colorado City, Texas, to an AI computing startup. The Bitcoin miner projects the contract to net the company $3 billion over its initial 10-year term and $7 billion if two five-year extensions are exercised.
Cipher Mining struck the deal with Fluidstack, an AI computing startup based in the U.K. Google has agreed to backstop $1.4 billion in the startup’s lease obligations, and, in return, receive 5.4% in equity in Cipher Mining.
“We believe this transaction represents the first of several in the HPC space,” Tyler Page, CEO of Cipher Miner, said in a statement, referring to high-performance computing, an industry term that generally refers to AI.
Under the deal, Cipher Mining will repurpose its Bitcoin mining data center in Texas for AI services—and potentially expand its existing campus to accommodate increased demand.
This isn’t the first deal Google has helped broker a deal with a Bitcoin miner. In August, TeraWulf announced that it had struck a $3.7 billion deal to lease out a data center it owns in western New York to Fluidstack. Google agreed to backstop $1.8 billion of the deal and received 8% in TeraWulf equity.
