All capital is fungible...
Bombing experts during World War II: The Knightian Theory of BOMBS
just bomb anything; in time, capital is infinitely substitutable
well, not quite: there's specificity and non-reversibility, but the AI/mining/datacenter units have quite a lot of overlap.
...but Mr. FTX got some of his bankruptcy estate bought up and taken over by... drumrolls... an AI firm
A bitcoin-mining business that appeared left for dead after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire is being resuscitated to serve the artificial-intelligence build-out.
The business, previously known as Genesis Digital Assets, had been snarled for years in the FTX bankruptcy process. It was taken over this summer by SWI SWICH -3.08%decrease; down pointing triangleGroup, a digital-infrastructure company that has been buying up data centers in the U.S. and Europe to serve AI companies hungry for computing power.
“We need capital to deploy more compute,” said Max-Hervé George, co-founder and chief executive of SWI. He added that he had “zero interest” in bitcoin mining.
What his firm is interested in: the data centers in Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Sweden it bought with Genesis Digital. SWI hopes to put them at the service of the so-called hyperscalers—cloud-computing providers such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, which provide much of the computing firepower behind ChatGPT and similar AI tools.
Bankman-Fried got involved starting in 2021. He ultimately invested more than $1 billion in Genesis Digital through his cryptocurrency trading firm, Alameda Research, which ended up with a 20% stake in the company.
Lol, this development is the most ironic: SBF was right... he was just illiquid, not insolvent! (should have received a Fed bailout, no??)
Today, some of his investments appear better in hindsight than they did when FTX failed and prosecutors accused him of misappropriating billions of dollars in customer funds to go on a huge spending spree. Notably, he invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, giving FTX a stake of 7.8% in the startup before the AI boom turned it into a household name. The FTX bankruptcy estate sold its stake in Anthropic for $1.3 billion in 2024. Based on the AI company’s last valuation, that stake would now be worth about $75 billion.
Ah, pain from prison! #1592160
Fraud is not incompatible with good investment sense.
Alchian's Knightians were right: capital is substitutable. Genesis Digital's mining rigs became AI data centers. SBF saw it he just ran out of liquidity. "SBF was right, just illiquid" stings. Knightian Bomb Theory is a hell of a name for a strategy.