CoreWeave, a publicly traded AI cloud infrastructure company, announced on Friday a “multi-year” agreement with AI developer Anthropic, which will use CoreWeave’s cloud computing data centers for its Claude AI model workloads.
The agreement will be rolled out in phases, with the “potential to expand over time,” according to CoreWeave’s announcement.
Shares of CoreWeave surged more than 12% on Friday and are trading at $102.73 at the time of writing.
The agreement follows CoreWeave’s recent $8.5 billion capital raise, led by tech giant Meta Platforms.
The financing was collateralized against CoreWeave’s deployed computing capacity, which is tied to predictable cash flows, rather than its graphics processing unit hardware, marking a notable departure from traditional crypto mining financing structures.
CoreWeave pivoted away from crypto mining and rebranded as an AI infrastructure company in 2019, as the mining sector faced prolonged economic pressure following the 2018 crypto market downturn.
Related: Core Scientific secures up to $1B credit from Morgan Stanley for data centers
AI continues to draw miners away as economic headwinds hamper the crypto industry
Bitcoin (BTC) miners are struggling with rising energy costs, reduced rewards and declining crypto asset prices, leading many to repurpose their mining hardware for AI processing.
Up to 20% of Bitcoin miners are unprofitable in the current economic environment, according to asset manager CoinShares’ latest mining report.
Crypto miners must generate yield on their assets by deploying their crypto on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to shore up declining revenues, according to market maker Wintermute.
The mining industry’s economic challenges worsened after the October 2025 market crash, which took BTC down from a high of about $126,000 to the low $60,000 range. Prices have since stabilized around $73,000.
The high costs of mining and shrinking profit margins threaten the viability of Bitcoin mining, with AI workloads becoming much more attractive in this environment, according to market analyst Ran Neuner.
“Both industries compete for the same thing: electricity, and right now, AI is willing to pay much more for it,” he said.
Magazine: AI has dramatically accelerated the quantum threat to Bitcoin: AI Eye
