Nine months after its own shareholders torpedoed a roughly $9bn takeover by CoreWeave, Core Scientific has found a far larger partner in the chipmaker trying to loosen Nvidia’s grip on artificial intelligence.
On Tuesday the former bitcoin miner said it had signed a data-centre agreement with AMD that could eventually reach 2.5 gigawatts of capacity across the American South, and investors treated it as vindication for the deal it had walked away from.
At the core of the arrangement is a set of long-term leases covering 529 megawatts of critical IT capacity, of which AMD has taken 377MW directly while a group of unnamed neocloud operators account for the remaining 152MW.
The sites sit in Pecos and Hunt County in Texas, Muskogee in Oklahoma, Auburn in Alabama, and Dalton in Georgia, and the leases run for 15 years with three five-year renewal options, so the relationship could stretch across three decades. Revenue is expected to start flowing in 2027.
What turns a sizeable colocation deal into a landmark one, at least as both companies framed it, is the option and equity bolted onto it.
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AMD has reserved the right to call on up to 1,925MW of further capacity through December 2028, which is how the partnership arrives at its headline 2.5GW, and it receives a warrant for up to 30 million Core Scientific shares at $23.47 apiece, vesting at 12,222 shares for every megawatt it brings online.
About 6.5 million of those shares vested the moment the leases were signed. It is much the same equity-for-capacity structure Nvidia used when it took a $2.1bn warrant in IREN, and it ties a chipmaker’s upside to the fortunes of the landlord housing its silicon.
Neither side put a dollar value on the commitment, and much of the framing came from Core Scientific, which said the new contracts lift its leased footprint to roughly 1.1GW and push its contracted revenue past $24bn.
Those are company figures rather than independently audited ones, so they read as a direction of travel more than a booked result.
The chips, at least, are not in doubt, since the capacity will run AMD’s Instinct GPUs, EPYC processors, and ROCm software.
For AMD the appeal is guaranteed real estate at a moment when it is straining to be taken seriously against Nvidia in both training and inference.
The company has spent the past two years buying and partnering its way toward that credibility, whether by acquiring Silo AI or by promising Anthropic up to two gigawatts of its newest accelerators, and locking in power ahead of demand removes one of the harder bottlenecks.
For Core Scientific, the deal caps a strange and quietly triumphant year. The company spent much of 2025 as CoreWeave’s target, after the GPU cloud offered roughly $9bn in an all-stock deal to fold the miner’s power-hungry sites into its own.
Core Scientific’s investors were unconvinced the price captured the value of that land and power, and on October 30 they voted it down, forcing the company to terminate the merger.
The two are not fully estranged, though, since Core Scientific still hosts CoreWeave’s GPUs under a separate deal worth several hundred megawatts.
The pivot from crypto mining to AI infrastructure is one the whole sector is making, and Nscale’s rapid rise along the same crypto-to-neocloud path shows how richly the market has rewarded it.
One wrinkle is worth watching, because 152MW of the new capacity goes to neocloud operators rather than to AMD directly, and the chipmaker has agreed to provide credit support should one of those tenants default.
AMD, in other words, is partly backstopping the smaller clouds that will run its hardware, a measure of how far it will now go to seed an ecosystem around its chips.
Core Scientific shares jumped as much as 10% on the news, even as AMD slipped more than 5%. The company that could not persuade its owners to sell for $9bn is now, on paper, worth rather more on its own.
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