Why bitcoin miner CleanSpark beat Microsoft for Wyoming AI data center

CleanSpark, a Las Vegas based bitcoin miner, is moving into artificial intelligence, beginning to develop AI data centers alongside its crypto-mining business. The company’s CEO laid out details of the recently announced strategy on CNBC’s “Crypto World” this week, and why it’s likely to become core to the business models of more crypto mining companies.

One key example of why bitcoin miners can win in the booming data center market: CleanSpark recently won a 100-megawatt site in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and beat out the tech giant Microsoft for the contract, according to its CEO.

How did a company with a market cap under $6 billion best a $4 trillion company?

Speed to market.

“We were able to scale up and deploy 100 megawatt bitcoin mining facility in about six months, where to build a proper AI data center is going to take three to six years,” CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz said on CNBC. “Certainly, Cheyenne didn’t select CleanSpark because we had a stronger balance sheet than Microsoft,” he added.

The shift comes as competition for power intensifies, and in a sense, brings CleanSpark full circle, with Schultz noting that it started as an energy company before shifting to bitcoin mining five years ago and becoming one of the largest mining operations.

CleanSpark operates about 1.03 gigawatts of energized facilities and has another 1.7 gigawatts in its development pipeline. Schultz said the plan is to use bitcoin mining to rapidly build out and scale the infrastructure, or “monetizing megawatts” as he referred to it, and then where data centers are already established, identify areas where it makes more sense to convert those to high performance compute and AI. Atlanta is one area he cited as a a prime example of an AI data center hotspot, second only to Northern Virginia on the East Coast.

“Bitcoin miners are uniquely positioned in that we have the ability to build out and energize data centers very rapidly,” Schultz said. “Where we’re seeing constraints is on access to power,” he added.

On Tuesday, CleanSpark announced a partnership with Submer, a data center design and construction firm, to develop AI- focused campuses across North America. The aim is to combine CleanSpark’s energy and land portfolio with Submer’s liquid-cooled, high density infrastructure systems.

“We are positioned to deliver AI capacity at gigawatt scale, faster, cleaner, and more efficiently than traditional approaches,” Schultz said in a press release announcing the deal. “This relationship perfectly aligns with our vision of transforming CleanSpark’s infrastructure platform into the backbone of the next era of intelligent computing,” he said.

Training and running AI models requires enormous power. Hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are spending record sums on new data centers, and signing deals at a fast pace…