An FTX-era bitcoin miner is being turned into AI capacity

SWI Group, listed on Euronext Amsterdam, has raised €800 million, about $894 million, from institutional investors. The capital increase values the company at €6.1 billion, and SWI says the money goes into data centre and AI computing projects in Europe and the United States.

The asset at the centre of the plan is Genesis Digital Assets, a bitcoin miner that Alameda Research, the trading firm of former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, had backed. SWI bought about 40% of it in June for $500 million, completed the acquisition in August with 70% of the voting rights, and renamed the unit SWI Digital. The intention now is to sell Genesis's sites in Kazakhstan and put its US and Swedish facilities to work on AI instead.

Chief executive Max-Hervé George told the Wall Street Journal he had zero interest in bitcoin mining. That is the useful detail: the value SWI paid for was not the mining fleet but the power connections and data centre sites behind it.

SWI is not alone in that reading. Listed miners such as TeraWulf and Core Scientific are converting power access and capacity into AI hosting, and CoinDesk counts more than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts signed by bitcoin miners, which want steadier revenue than mining currently gives them.

For anyone tracking where AI compute will come from, the pattern matters more than any single deal. The scarce input is a site with power already connected, and miners hold such sites; SWI's raise is a bet that they are worth more running AI workloads than mining.