Bitcoin Miner Firm Northern Data Spends $360 Million on GPUs for AI Services

Northern Information – a German knowledge heart and Bitcoin mining operator – has spent one other $360 million on GPUs to bolster its cloud computing companies.

The transfer indicators additional integration of Bitcoin miners into the AI sector the place trade corporations profit from pre-existing infrastructure and economies of scale.

Diving Deep Into AI

Taiga Cloud – Northern Information’s AI-focused subsidiary – introduced the acquisition in a press release on Wednesday.

The funding, price 330 million euros, netted the corporate 384 cupboards of HPE Cray XD supercomputers, geared up with roughly 8,200 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs in complete.

“Taiga Cloud’s prospects can have entry to purpose-built HPE expertise for generative AI improvements that ship the dimensions and efficiency of a supercomputer required for a rising market of compute-intensive AI workloads.”

The funding follows Northern Information’s separate purchase of 10,000 NVIDIA cloud GPUs in September, utilizing assist from Tether – the world’s largest stablecoin issuer. Tether owns a partial stake in Northern Information, and offered the agency a $609 million debt financing facility earlier this month.

The agency added that its AI cloud amenities are “100% carbon impartial,” addressing energy-related issues that plague AI and knowledge facilities and bitcoin miners alike. Earlier this month, Northern Information began construction of a 30MW mining facility in North Dakota.

The place Mining Meets AI

Since ChatGPT and OpenAI kicked off explosive AI progress late final 12 months, demand for NVIDIA’s semiconductor chips has skyrocketed. The corporate’s inventory is up 226% 12 months up to now.

Amongst their many hungry prospects are bitcoin mining firms – corporations that already boast the information facilities, cooling amenities, and entry to low cost power required to run a cloud computing service at scale. All that’s lacking are the chips themselves, because the computer systems used to mine BTC (aka ASICs) aren’t good for a lot moreover that one goal.

Public mining agency Iris Power, for instance, announced a “revitalization” of its high-performance computing knowledge heart technique in June. HIVE Digital started repurposing its outdated Ethereum mining rigs after the Merge to serve the identical goal.

Specialists have famous that HPC companies are far more profitable per unit of power in comparison with BTC mining. The latter, nevertheless, is extra appropriate with balancing power grids and utilizing renewable power sources.