Author: Xiao Bing
In Abilene, Texas, on a construction site covering approximately 1,000 acres, eight H-shaped data centers are gradually becoming operational.
This is the first major campus of OpenAI's "Stargate" project. The entire project has a planned capacity of 1.2 gigawatts. The first two buildings are already online, with the rest still under construction.
The campus is operated by Oracle. Its developer, called Crusoe, originally started in Bitcoin mining.
Founder Chase Lochmiller was formerly a partner at crypto fund Polychain Capital.
In 2018, he and his childhood friend Cully Cavness discovered that U.S. oil fields were flaring vast amounts of stranded associated natural gas daily. The duo moved generators and mining rigs to the wellheads, using what would have been wasted gas to mine Bitcoin.
The business logic was simple:Find power in remote areas and turn it into computing power very quickly.
Seven years later, their client has shifted from the Bitcoin network to OpenAI. In 2025, Crusoe sold its Bitcoin business of over 425 modular data centers to NYDIG to focus on developing AI.
Crusoe's transformation may seem like a major leap, but its core capabilities have remained consistent: finding power, building data centers, and operating and maintaining them.
Like Crusoe, many other companies and individuals have made similarly impressive pivots from Crypto to AI. They are not like the "PayPal Mafia"—originating from the same company—nor do they share a common organization. What connects them are three types of assets left over from the last Crypto cycle:
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Electricity, land, and grid interconnection permits secured by mining companies; -
Engineers and entrepreneurs trained by Crypto companies; -
Capital accumulated during the last bull market.
After 2022, these three asset types began flowing into AI simultaneously.
Mining Companies Are Selling Electricity to AI, Not Mining Rigs
"The greatest conflict facing humanity's future is the contradiction between the ever-increasing need for data processing and limited computing power."
In 2019, Bitmain founder Jihan Wu wrote this in an article titled "The Beauty of Computing Power," explicitly stating it as the reason Bitmain was investing in AI chips.
At the time, these words seemed like public relations rhetoric. Looking back six years later, they read more like a prophecy written in advance.
In February 2026, Jihan Wu's mining company Bitdeer announced it was liquidating all its Bitcoin inventory to provide liquidity for building AI data centers, decisively pivoting from Crypto to AI.
Bitcoin mining companies pivoting to AI is often misunderstood by the public as "turning mining rigs into AI servers." The reality is different.
Bitcoin mining rigs are mostly ASIC chips designed for specific hash algorithms and cannot be used to train large models. Even the GPUs left over from Ethereum mining farms often fail to meet the networking, memory, liquid cooling, and reliability requirements of today's large AI clusters.
The truly valuable assets of mining companies are their data centers already connected to the power grid.
Building an AI data center, the hardest part is often not buying GPUs, but securing hundreds of megawatts of stable electricity, acquiring land, substations, transmission lines, and construction permits. This process can take years. Mining companies, driven by the need to lower costs and comply with regulations, have already completed much of this groundwork in North America, Northern Europe, and the Middle East.
When Bitcoin mining profits decline and AI companies are willing to sign long-term, high-value contracts, mining companies naturally begin switching clients.
CoreWeave was one of the earliest to complete this transition.
In 2016, three commodity traders placed a GPU on their pool table in a Manhattan office and started mining Ethereum. When the Crypto winter arrived, they took advantage of falling prices to acquire a large number of second-hand graphics cards, later expanding their business into film and TV rendering and machine learning.
The company was initially called Atlantic Crypto, later renamed CoreWeave. Its IPO documents show that before 2022, most of the company's revenue still came from cryptocurrency mining; thereafter, the Crypto business was completely discontinued.
Today, CoreWeave is a leading AI cloud company backed by NVIDIA. Its path is now being replicated by the entire crypto mining industry.
In 2026, TeraWulf signed a data center lease with Anthropic for approximately 401 megawatts over 20 years, with an initial contract value of about $19 billion;
Cipher Mining signed a 300-megawatt, approximately $5.5 billion, 15-year agreement with AWS;
Core Scientific allocated large amounts of data center capacity to CoreWeave on a long-term basis.
Hut 8 signed two consecutive 15-year leases at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, each with a base contract value of about $9.8 billion.
After reaching a $9.7 billion cloud services agreement with Microsoft, IREN in July 2026 disclosed new contracts totaling $2.8 billion.
According to CoinShares statistics, by the first quarter of 2026, publicly listed mining companies had announced over $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts. Meanwhile, Bitcoin mining revenue per unit of hashrate once fell to around $30 to $35 per day per PH/s, pushing some mines using older equipment or with higher electricity costs close to breakeven.
Mining companies have transformed from computing power facilities of the crypto era into the computing power infrastructure of the AI era, remaining squarely in the spotlight.
From OpenSea to OpenRouter
Besides mining farms, people from the Crypto industry are also migrating to AI.
Alex Atallah is the co-founder and former CTO of OpenSea. At the height of the NFT craze, OpenSea's monthly trading volume once exceeded $4 billion. In July 2022, Atallah left the company, planning to start a new venture.
In 2023, he founded OpenRouter.
The problem OpenRouter solves is straightforward: there are increasingly more large language models, each with different prices, speeds, and capabilities. Developers don't want to integrate APIs for each model company. Through OpenRouter, they just need to connect one interface to call hundreds of models, with requests automatically routed based on price, performance, and availability.
In 2025, OpenRouter completed a combined $40 million in funding at a valuation of approximately $500 million.
In May 2026, it completed a $113 million Series B round led by CapitalG, raising its valuation to about $1.3 billion. Over the past six months, the number of tokens processed weekly on the platform grew from 5 trillion to 25 trillion.
OpenRouter and OpenSea don't do exactly the same thing, but their business structures are quite similar.
OpenSea aggregates NFT buyers and sellers, while OpenRouter aggregates models, compute suppliers, and developers. The former facilitates digital asset transactions, the latter facilitates inference requests. The product changed, but the ability to build markets and integrate fragmented supply did not.
Some Crypto traces even remain directly in the product. On OpenRouter's signup page, next to Google and GitHub login, there is still a MetaMask option, and the platform also accepts USDC payments.
Fal.ai is another example.
Founder Burkay Gur previously worked on building a machine learning platform at Coinbase. He started his own company in 2021, initially developing machine learning data pipelines and deployment tools.
After Stable Diffusion was open-sourced, they noticed that while image and video models were proliferating, inference was slow, deployment cumbersome, and GPU utilization low. So Fal.ai shifted its focus to generative media inference.
This pivot paid off quickly.
By mid-2025, Fal.ai's annualized revenue approached $95 million. In December of the same year, the company completed a $140 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, reaching a valuation of $4.5 billion. Companies like Adobe, Canva, and Perplexity all use its generative media infrastructure.
Using Crypto Money to Fuel AI
While mining companies provide power and data centers to AI, capital accumulated during the Crypto cycle is entering AI in another way.
The most direct example is Jed McCaleb.
He created the crypto exchange Mt.Gox, and later co-founded Ripple and Stellar, becoming one of the earliest billionaires in the Crypto industry.
In 2023, McCaleb's Navigation Fund allocated approximately $500 million to purchase 24,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in one go, forming Voltage Park to rent GPUs to AI companies and research institutions.
He didn't create another public blockchain. Instead, he turned the money earned from Crypto into the most scarce asset in the AI industry.
In 2026, Voltage Park merged with the AI development platform Lightning AI, with the combined entity valued at roughly $2.5 billion. Wealth accumulated from the last crypto cycle thus became part of the balance sheet of an AI cloud company.
The investment portfolio of SBF, founder of the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, provides an even more dramatic case.
In 2022, SBF invested $500 million in the then little-known Anthropic, acquiring approximately a 13.5% stake. After FTX's bankruptcy, the liquidation team sold these shares in batches in 2024, recovering about $1.3 billion. Today, Anthropic's post-money valuation is $965 billion. Assuming FTX had not sold its shares, its stake would likely be diluted to around 6.7%, worth approximately $65 billion—a roughly 130-fold return on the initial $500 million investment.
Cursor's story is more extreme.
In April 2022, SBF's fund Alameda participated in an early round of funding for Anysphere with $200,000. This company later launched the AI programming tool Cursor. After FTX entered bankruptcy proceedings, the liquidation team sold this stake for $200,000 in April 2023—almost exactly the original price.
In June 2026, SpaceX announced its acquisition of Anysphere in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion. According to public reports, Alameda initially received rights representing about 5% of the company. If we completely ignore any dilution from subsequent funding rounds, the paper value of this stake could reach $3 billion—a 15,000-fold return on the initial $200,000 investment.
This shouldn't be interpreted solely as proof of SBF's investment genius. A more accurate understanding is that, even before ChatGPT's launch, some of the most aggressive, highest-risk-capital from the Crypto bull market had already begun seeking out AI projects.
During the Crypto market boom, a significant amount of capital believed two things:Computing power would become increasingly valuable, and software networks could expand globally in a very short time. AI fits both conditions perfectly.
Therefore, when Crypto capital entered AI, it wasn't just buying graphics cards; it was also funding new technological and organizational experiments.
Nous Research is a typical case.
Nous's Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent capable of accumulating long-term memory and autonomously generating skills. According to OpenRouter statistics, Hermes Agent's token usage ranks first globally, surpassing Claude Code.
In 2025, Crypto investment firm Paradigm led Nous Research's $50 million Series A round.
According to reports at the time, this financing valued the company's yet-to-be-issued tokens at approximately $1 billion. Previous investors in Nous also included crypto VC Distributed Global and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Besides Hermes, Nous is also developing Psyche, a distributed model training network built on Solana.
Traditional AI labs need to concentrate large numbers of GPUs in a single data center. Psyche aims to validate an alternative path: connect GPUs scattered across different regions, owned by different participants, to collaboratively train models, coordinating training progress, verifying participants, and distributing rewards via smart contracts.
Currently, Psyche remains an experiment, with its testnet tokens explicitly labeled by the official team as having no economic value. However, it represents another kind of influence from Crypto capital entering AI.
OpenAI also seriously considered a similar direction in its early days.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015, but the funding needed for cutting-edge models soon exceeded what donations could support. By the end of 2017, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were already discussing new financing structures. One option was a token offering.
Later public internal emails show the team seriously researched issuing tokens in early 2018. Elon Musk explicitly opposed it, believing a token offering would severely damage OpenAI's credibility. OpenAI later added that by the end of January that year, the team itself had gradually lost interest in the plan.
OpenAI ultimately chose to establish a for-profit entity and secured massive investment from Microsoft, but Sam Altman didn't leave Crypto behind.
In 2019, he co-founded Worldcoin with Alex Blania and Max Novendstern. This project uses iris-scanning devices called Orbs to verify that a user is a real and unique human, establishing an identity and payment network via World ID and the WLD token.
From Crusoe and CoreWeave to OpenRouter, Fal.ai, and Nous Research, these individual stories full of survivor bias do not mean that Crypto companies have a higher chance of success when pivoting to AI.
Mining companies left behind electricity, land, and grid permits; exchanges and Web3 companies trained a group of engineers familiar with distributed systems, GPU orchestration, and globalized products; the wealth created by token appreciation then became capital for buying graphics cards, investing in model companies, and funding technological experiments.
Crypto didn't magically transform into AI. It merely channeled the resources left from the last cycle to the next industry that needed them more.
