Marble A250,000-square-foot local crypto mine – the largest of the three in Cherokee County by far – appears to be switching from bitcoin to another rising technology: artificial intelligence.
Core Scientific Inc. – one of the more established large-scale Bitcoin miners – announced a 12-year partnership with CoreWeave to deliver about 270 megawatts to host CoreWeave’s NVIDIA graphics processing unit for high-performance architectures operations used to train artificial intelligence.
The deal has an expected value of $6.7 billion. Core Scientific’s Marble plant, which has a 104 megawatt capacity, would fulfill about 38 percent of the contract’s requirement.
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The normally loud plant established in 2018 was eerily quiet Friday. Plant manager Jack Lewis said he could not comment about plans in progress, but media reports – including articles posted on Core Scientific’s website – describe factors that indicate changes are in progress.
It remains to be seen whether the changes are allowed under a local moratorium on high-impact industries, however.
“I had heard that they were switching their operations to something to do with AI,” Cherokee County Manager Randy Wiggins told the Scout on Monday. “Once they do anything that requires the pulling of a permit, Code Enforcement will evaluate the work to be performed under the permit against the moratorium to determine if there are any issues that may prevent the issuance of the permit.”
Cherokee County’s moratorium took effect in October 2023. A planning board established to work out permanent restrictions against high-impact industries – such as chemical waste dumps, quarries and crypto mines – has not yet produced a permanent plan. The moratorium expires in two months but could be extended.
After three plants were established in Cherokee County, it was the crypto mine industry that triggered the moratorium in the first place.
Bitcoin
According to investopedia.com, Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions are officially entered on the blockchain. A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes.
It is the way new bitcoins are launched into circulation.
Mining is conducted by miners using hardware and software to generate a cryptographic number that is equal to or less than a number set by the Bitcoin network’s difficulty algorithm.
The first miner to find the solution to the problem receives bitcoins as a reward, and the process begins again. This reward is an incentive that motivates miners to assist in the primary purpose of mining: to earn the right to record transactions on the blockchain for the network to verify and confirm.
Among seven plants in five states, Texas-based Core Scientific operates a plant at the intersection of Palmer Lane and Airport Road, the former Coats American plant that closed in 2004. Lewis was the manager of that plant as well.
The facility includes an existing 250,000-square-foot building. Additional construction included modular containers and two larger new adjacent buildings.
Total power is 104 megawatts – enough to support 52,000 households for one day. The electricity is used for cooling, servers, storage drives and networking.
Though noisy and a huge consumer of electricity, the plant is regarded as a less-obtrusive mining facility compared to smaller open-air operations in Ranger and off of Harshaw Road that are owned by other companies.
Residents around the Marble plant noticed the plant was shut down amid some sort of large-scale deliveries of equipment. The sudden quiet was startling, one neighbor who asked to not be identified told the Cherokee Scout.
Artificial intelligence
Like crypto mining, vast computing resources are required to train artificial intelligence computing. Because crypto mines have all the necessary resources, they make perfect locations for AI operations.
According to Google Cloud, artificial intelligence is a field of science concerned with building computers and machines that can reason, learn, and act in such a way that would normally require human intelligence or that involves data whose scale exceeds what humans can analyze.
“AI is a broad field that encompasses many different disciplines, including computer science, data analytics and statistics, hardware and software engineering, linguistics, neuroscience, and even philosophy and psychology,” according to Google Cloud.
“On an operational level for business use, AI is a set of technologies that are based primarily on machine learning and deep learning, used for data analytics, predictions and forecasting, object categorization, natural language processing, recommendations, intelligent data retrieval and more.”
Core Scientific
According to published reports, shares of bitcoin miner Core Scientific surged, outperforming other crypto-linked stocks, after the company signed an extension of its earlier high-performance computing contract with CoreWeave.
The miner said in a statement that it has exercised its option from a previous contract to host about 112 megawatts of additional GPUs for “AI Hyperscaler” firm CoreWeave.
The new contract is expected to add about $2 billion of additional revenue, bringing the total to $6.7 billion, starting in the first half of 2026. CoreWeave will be bearing the cost for all capital investments needed to get Core Scientific’s existing mining infrastructure ready for HPC, the statement added.
“We have now contracted with CoreWeave for a total of 382 megawatts of HPC infrastructure, reflecting the strong demand for high-power data center infrastructure and the unique ability of our team to deliver it,” said Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan.
Core Scientific filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a decline in bitcoin prices. U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas confirmed the company’s reorganization plan in January, clearing the way for Core Scientific to emerge and re-list on Nasdaq by the end of January.
Core Scientific (CORZ) stock value on Nasdaq was $9.70 per share just before close Monday, compared to $3.44 per share when it was re-listed on Jan. 24. Its peak this year was $11.70 on July 16.
The company paid Cherokee County $271,677 in personal taxes and $90,619 in property taxes in 2023, according to the Cherokee County Tax Collector’s Office.