Marble – A 250,000- square-foot factory that once produced thread for garments before converting to industrial-strength crypto mining is switching to the growing artificial intelligence industry and will become part of one of the world’s largest supercomputers.
Plant manager Jack Lewis said the switch to AI requires a “significantly larger number of employees” that will outstep the plant’s own water and wastewater facilities, requiring the facility to connect to nearby municipal water and sewer services.
Core Scientific, which owns the facility, is working with Marble Community Water System for water and negotiating with the Town of Andrews for wastewater treatment.
When Lewis appeared at the Dec. 12 Andrews Board of Aldermen meeting to request town sewer service, he said the expansion will make the Marble plant part of a supercomputer system that is “one of the biggest AI systems in the world.”
Lewis did not go into details but said he could offer more specific information to the town board in closed session. He did say Core Scientific has spent $2 million on the expansion so far.
Infrastructure at the plant was sufficient to support 382 employees the last year it was an American Thread plant in 2015. The number of employees there when it was a crypto mine is not publicly available, but was adequately served by existing infrastructure.
Switch to AI
Core Scientific’s Marble plant – once the largest of three Bitcoin mines in Cherokee County by far – started switching from crypto to artificial intelligence in August.
Austin, Texas-based Core Scientific Inc. – one of the more established large-scale Bitcoin miners – earlier this year announced a 12-year partnership with CoreWeave to deliver around 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 had a 104 megawatt capacity as of August, would fulfill about 38% of the contract’s requirement based on August numbers. Site plans show additional generators, so the capacity may change.
Cherokee County government imposed a temporary moratorium on high-impact industries including crypto mines in October 2023, but the restriction does not include AI processing plants.
A county planning board was established to work out permanent restrictions against high-impact industries such as chemical waste dumps, quarries and crypto mines, but has not yet produced a plan.
Among its seven plants in five states, Core Scientific’s Marble plant at the intersection of Palmer Lane and Airport Road in Marble was previously an American Thread plant, which closed in 1999. Its 104-megawatt capacity is enough to support 52,000 average 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 facility compared to smaller open-air operations in Ranger and Harshaw owned by other companies. Lewis told Andrews leaders that the water and sewer service was needed only to support increased personnel and the toilets, showers and kitchen on site.
Site plans filed with Cherokee County Code Enforcement show a newly constructed administrative building with men’s and women’s locker rooms with at least 40 lockers. The site plan includes four security offices, seven individual offices, a large open-floorpan office area, a kitchen-break room, a room for nursing mothers, a wellness room and a room called “touchdown focus.”
“We have a demolition permit on file, and they are in the process of obtaining a permit for the bulk of the project,” building codes administrator Jon Christ said Monday. “The permit is completed on our end, we are waiting on payment and for them to fill out the permit (i.e. signatures).”
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 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
Core Scientific (CORZ) said in a statement that it has exercised its option from a previous contract to host about 112 megawatt of additional GPUs for “AI Hyperscaler” firm CoreWeave.
The 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,” Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan said.
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.