Bitcoin Miner Firm North Data Spends $360 Million on GPUs for AI Services

Nord Data — a German data center and bitcoin mining operator — has spent another $360 million on GPUs to bolster its cloud computing services.

The move marks further integration into Bitcoin miners, where industry companies benefit from existing infrastructure and economies of scale.

A deep dive into AI

Taiga Cloud — North Data's AI-focused subsidiary — announced the acquisition in a press release on Wednesday.

The investment, worth 330 million euros, acquired the company a total of 384 cabinets of HPE Cray XD supercomputers equipped with 8,200 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

“Tyga Cloud customers will have access to HPE technology purpose-built for generative AI innovations, delivering the supercomputing scale and performance needed by the growing market for compute-intensive AI workloads.”

The investment follows Northern Data's purchase of 10,000 NVIDIA Cloud GPUs in September using support from Tether – the world's largest stablecoin. Tether owns a partial equity stake in Northern Data, and earlier this month provided the company with a $609 million debt financing facility.

The company added that its AI cloud facilities are “100% carbon neutral,” addressing energy-related concerns that plague AI and data centers and bitcoin mining facilities. Earlier this month, Northern Data began mining a 30MW mine in North Dakota.

Where mining meets AI

Demand for NVIDIA's semiconductor chips has surged since ChatGPT and OpenAI launched explosive AI development late last year. The company's stock is up 226% year to date.

Among their many hungry customers are bitcoin mining companies — companies that boast the cheap power needed to run data centers, cooling equipment and cloud computing services at scale. Computers that mine BTC (aka ASICs) aren't really good enough for a single purpose, so they're just wasted chips.

Public mining firm Iris Energy, for example, announced a “revitalization” of its high-performance computing data center strategy in June. HIV Digital started using its old Ethereum mining rig for the same purpose after the merger.

Experts have pointed out that HPC services are more profitable per unit of energy compared to BTC mining. The latter, however, is more suited to balancing energy grids and using renewable energy sources.