Core Scientific Pivots to AMD with 2.5GW AI Data-Centre Pact Months After CoreWeave Deal Collapsed
The former bitcoin miner has handed AMD a stretch of the American South to run its chips, less than a year after its own shareholders rejected a $9bn takeover.
July 28, 2026 – 1:36 pm
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 announced 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 are located 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.
The Deal:
- AMD’s Reservation: 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.
- Equity for Capacity: 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. Approximately 6.5 million of these shares vested the moment the leases were signed.
- Focus on Chips: The capacity will run AMD’s Instinct GPUs, EPYC processors, and ROCm software.
Implications:
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. 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.