Bitcoin miners have caught the eye of personal fairness (PE) companies on account of their information facilities that may energy synthetic intelligence-related (AI) machines.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Core Scientific’s Adam Sullivan, revealed that a number of approaches have been created from non-public fairness companies to finance their AI-related partnerships.

“Private equity is obviously chasing the data center space right now; even private equity firms that haven’t necessarily done data centers before are evaluating the space,” Sullivan stated.

Bitcoin miners can assist AI-related companies retailer their machines in already-built information centre infrastructures, fairly than AI companies constructing these amenities themselves.

“One of the biggest constraints [for data centers] right now is finding sites that have over 100 megawatts of power and have the high voltage substation’s transformer in place. Those are difficult sites to find, and it just so happens that’s been the criteria for locating bitcoin mining sites for the past four years,” Sullivan stated.

Bitdeer international advertising and marketing supervisor Retainna Lin advised Blockhead at Singapore’s inaugural SuperAI occasion that the agency is venturing into AI to utilize CPUs that had been as soon as used for Bitcoin mining, which have now grow to be redundant.

JP Morgan has stated this curiosity has additional validated the Bitcoin mining sector’s invovelemt in high-performance computing and will “usher in a new age of mergers and acquisitions for the miners,” based on CoinDesk.

Moreover, Bitcoin’s halving occasion, which triggered in April this yr, has improve the eye of PE companies.

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“The halving has also caught the attention of private equity firms, which see this event as an opportunity to consolidate smaller firms and fold their existing infrastructure into their own,” Core Scientific explained.

PE firms are providing capital to Bitcoin miners to help with the cost of repurposing these data centres, which is steep.

“Many of these Bitcoin mining companies are struggling right now to build their bitcoin mining facilities, and these private equity firms are looking at potential returns, looking at ways that they can grab economic value out of some of these potential conversions [from mining to HCP],” said Sullivan.

Powering these facilities requires a hefty amount of energy too. According to Just Energy, the energy consumption of all crypto assets combined is between 0.4% and 0.9% of annual global electricity usage, or 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year. These figures amount to more energy usage than all the world’s data centres combined.

Bitcoin mining derives its energy from fossil fuels (43%), hydropower (23%), wind power (14%), nuclear (8%), solar (5%), and other renewables (2%). But now, the crypto industry, as well as other pockets of the tech industry are reconsidering tapping more into nuclear energy.

Consequently, crypto exchange Kraken is now considering using nuclear energy to power its data centres due to increased demand for its services. Although the exchange isn’t looking to build its own reactors, it is considering partnering with nuclear power providers with small modular reactors (SMR).

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“With institutions moving into the crypto asset class and activity moving on-chain, the need for reliable fiat onramps continues to grow,” Kraken CTO Vishnu Patankar defined. “Bolstering our energy resiliency means we strengthen a direct avenue into the crypto ecosystem, supporting its continued growth.”