Shares of several bitcoin miners with large Texas campuses that are expanding into AI and data center infrastructure gained on Thursday as state regulators approved a new framework for connecting large electricity users to the grid.
Cipher Digital (CIFR) reached a new all-time high of $30 today and is up over 10% according to The Block's equities price page, while Core Scientific (CORZ) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) were up 3% and 2.2%, respectively.
This comes as the Public Utility Commission of Texas approved ERCOT's new "Batch Zero" process for allocating grid capacity power to large-scale electricity users.
Texas is grappling with a massive wave of power demand from the AI data center sector. ERCOT says more than 438,000 megawatts of proposed demand are currently in its connection queue, with roughly 90% of those requests coming from data centers.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas developed the new system after realizing its older approach of evaluating power requests one by one was becoming too slow.
