Here's a pretty cool story over at BTCHEL, via Byblos Digital:

Every mining conference this year has the same hallway conversation. Someone’s site is being valued at ten times what it was worth as a hashrate operation, and the buyer doesn’t care about hashrate at all. They care about the interconnection agreement.

"That is the whole trade. Miners spent a decade acquiring the one thing AI cannot buy quickly: permitted, energized, grid-connected land.""That is the whole trade. Miners spent a decade acquiring the one thing AI cannot buy quickly: permitted, energized, grid-connected land."

Summary:

1. The deals are real and they are concentrated.
2. Miners have never raised venture capital, and still don’t.
3. But venture capital does fund miners, once they stop mining....

"Same assets. Same engineers. Same power contracts. Different label, and a completely different capital market opens up.""Same assets. Same engineers. Same power contracts. Different label, and a completely different capital market opens up."

wither Bitcoin mining...? will it just be us heatpunks mining? #1466211

The AI pivot is not being funded by a wave of enthusiastic capital. In a meaningful number of cases, it is funded by selling bitcoin at a loss. Core Scientific liquidated 2,385 BTC (over $200M) in March to fund its transition.

This is what “miners are becoming AI companies” actually looks like from the inside: a CFO crystallizing a loss on the treasury, surrendering the upside, triggering a taxable event, and doing it at exactly the moment they’d least like to be forced into it.

Full story over at http://btchel.com/news... also sign up for The Nordic Node, a bi-weekly and Den-snarky newsletter about Bitcoin in the Nordics: "Your No. 1 Place for What’s Bitcoining in the Nordics!"