(Bloomberg) — Bitcoin miner Core Scientific Inc. has rejected an unsolicited $1 billion takeover offer from artificial intelligence startup CoreWeave Inc., just days after the companies announced a partnership that they projected would generate about $3.5 billion in revenue.
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The Austin, Texas-based company is one of the largest digital-asset miners by computing power with data center capacity that can be converted to high-performance computing facilities to power generative AI applications. CoreWeave, which has raised billions of dollars and is mulling an initial public offering, proposed to acquire the miner with $5.75 per share in cash, late Monday.
The artificial-intelligence boom has created an unprecedented shortage of both data-center space and the graphics-processing unit chips used in AI, as well as quick access to enough electricity to power it all. New facilities being built are quickly filling up: About 83% of data-center capacity under construction has already been leased in advance, with AI companies and cloud-service providers driving the demand, according to a March report by commercial real-estate firm CBRE Group.
“The Board determined that the CoreWeave proposal significantly undervalues the company and is not in the best interests of the company and its shareholders,” Core Scientific said in a statement on Thursday.
The mining company touted it has identified about 500-megawatt capacity for HPC operations, making Core Scientific one of the largest digital infrastructure providers even among traditional data centers.
The acquisition proposal came on the heels of a series of 12-year contracts between the two companies, in which the miner will deliver 200-megawatt capacity to power the graphics processing units owned by CoreWeave. Shares of Core Scientific soared 40% on Tuesday on the announcement.
Core Scientific was little changed at around $7.17 in pre-market trading. The stock has more than doubled this year.
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