Written by: Little Cake
In Abilene, Texas, on a site of about 1,000 acres, eight H-shaped data centers are gradually coming into operation.
This is the first large park of OpenAI's "Star Gate" program. The entire project is planned with a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, and the first two buildings are already online, while the remaining buildings are still under construction.
The park is operated by Oracle, with a developer called Crusoe behind it, but it initially focused on Bitcoin mining.
Founder Chase Lochmiller was a partner at the crypto fund Polychain Capital.
In 2018, he and childhood friend Cully Cavness discovered that large amounts of untransportable associated natural gas were being burned off daily at U.S. oil fields. The two relocated power generation equipment and mining machines to the wellheads, using the natural gas that would otherwise be wasted to mine Bitcoin.
This business logic is simple: find electricity in remote areas and convert it to computing power in a very short time.
Seven years later, clients moved from the Bitcoin network to OpenAI. In 2025, Crusoe will sell its Bitcoin business, which will have more than 425 modular data centers, to NYDIG and focus on developing AI.
Crusoe's transformation seems substantial, but in fact its core capability has not changed: finding electricity, building data centers, and operating and maintaining them.
Like Crusoe, many companies and individuals are completing a spectacular transformation from Crypto to AI. They do not come from the same company like the PayPal mafia, nor do they have a common organization; what connects them are three types of assets left over from the last Crypto cycle:
Electricity, land, and grid connection permits held by mining companies;
Engineers and entrepreneurs trained by Crypto companies;
Capital accumulated during the last bull market.
After 2022, these three types of assets began to flow into AI simultaneously.
The power miners sell to AI is not mining machines, but electricity
"The biggest contradiction in humanity's future is between the growing data processing demands and limited computing power."
In 2019, Wu Jihan, founder of Bitmain, wrote this in his article "The Beauty of Computing Power," directly stating that this is the reason Bitmain invested in AI chips.
This statement seemed like PR at the time, but looking back six years later, it resembles a pre-written prophecy.
In February 2026, Wu Jihan's mining company Bit Deer announced it would liquidate all Bitcoin inventory to provide liquidity for building AI data centers, showing a strong resolve to transition from Crypto to AI.
The transition of Bitcoin mining companies to AI is frequently misunderstood by the public as "modifying mining machines into AI servers," but the reality is different.
Most Bitcoin mining machines are ASIC chips that can only execute specific hashing algorithms and cannot be used to train large models. Even GPUs left over from Ethereum mining are hard-pressed to meet today's large AI clusters' requirements for networking, memory, liquid cooling, and reliability.
The truly valuable asset for mining companies is data centers that have already connected to the power grid.
Building an AI data center, the hardest part is often not buying GPUs, but finding hundreds of megawatts of stable power, acquiring land, substations, transmission lines, and building permits. This process can take years, and mining companies have completed extensive preliminary work in North America, Northern Europe, and the Middle East in order to reduce mining costs and ensure compliance.
As Bitcoin mining profits dwindle and AI companies are willing to sign long-term, high-price contracts, mining firms naturally begin to change clients.
CoreWeave was one of the first to complete this transition.
In 2016, three commodity traders placed a GPU on a billiard table in an office in Manhattan and began mining Ethereum. After the Crypto winter hit, they took advantage of falling prices to acquire a large number of second-hand graphics cards and subsequently expanded their business into film rendering and machine learning.
This company was originally called Atlantic Crypto, later renamed CoreWeave. Its listing documents show that before 2022, most of the company's revenue still came from cryptocurrency mining; thereafter, Crypto operations were completely halted.
Today, CoreWeave is a leading AI cloud company backed by Nvidia, and its path is being replicated across 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 agreement worth about $5.5 billion over 15 years with AWS;
Core Scientific will provide a large capacity of data centers to CoreWeave on a long-term basis.
Hut 8 signed two consecutive 15-year leases in Texas' Beacon Point park, each with a base contract value of about $9.8 billion.
IREN, after reaching a $9.7 billion cloud service agreement with Microsoft, disclosed a new contract totaling $2.8 billion in July 2026.
According to CoinShares statistics, as of the first quarter of 2026, publicly listed mining companies have announced more than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts. At the same time, the unit income per computing power from Bitcoin mining once fell to about $30 to $35 per PH/s per day, and some mining sites using older equipment or with higher electricity costs are close to losses.
Mining companies have transformed from computing power facilities of the crypto era into computing power infrastructure of the AI era and remain at the forefront.
From OpenSea to OpenRouter
In addition to mining farms, people in the Crypto industry are also migrating to AI.
Alex Atallah is a co-founder and former CTO of OpenSea. At the peak of NFT activity, OpenSea's monthly transaction volume once surpassed $4 billion. In July 2022, Atallah left the company to prepare for a new venture.
In 2023, he founded OpenRouter.
OpenRouter addresses a straightforward problem: with more and more large models, varying in price, speed, and capability, developers do not want to re-integrate APIs for every model company. Through OpenRouter, they only need to connect to one interface to access hundreds of models and automatically allocate requests based on price, performance, and availability.
By 2025, OpenRouter had completed a total of $40 million in funding, valuing the company at about $500 million.
In May 2026, it secured another $113 million in Series B funding led by CapitalG, raising its valuation to approximately $1.3 billion. In the past six months, the amount of Tokens processed by the platform weekly grew from 5 trillion to 25 trillion.
OpenRouter and OpenSea do not do exactly the same thing, but their business structures are quite similar.
OpenSea aggregates NFT buyers and sellers, while OpenRouter aggregates models, computing power suppliers, and developers. The former facilitates digital asset transactions, while the latter facilitates inference requests. The products have changed, but the ability to build markets and integrate fragmented supply has not.
Some traces of Crypto are even retained directly in the product. On OpenRouter's registration page, alongside Google and GitHub logins, MetaMask is still present, and the platform also accepts USDC payments.
Fal.ai is another example.
Founder Burkay Gur was involved in building machine learning platforms at Coinbase. In 2021, he started the company, initially developing machine learning data pipelines and deployment tools.
After Stable Diffusion became open-source, they discovered that while image and video models were increasing, inference speed was slow, deployment was troublesome, and GPU utilization was low. Therefore, Fal.ai shifted its focus to generative media inference.
This choice quickly paid off.
By mid-2025, Fal.ai's annualized revenue was approaching $95 million. In December of the same year, the company completed a $140 million Series D funding led by Sequoia Capital, reaching a valuation of $4.5 billion. Companies such as Adobe, Canva, and Perplexity are using its generative media infrastructure.
Using Crypto money to support AI
Mining companies provide AI with electricity and data centers, while capital accumulated during the Crypto cycle enters AI in another way.
The most direct example is Jed McCaleb.
He created the crypto exchange Mt.Gox, later co-founded Ripple and Stellar, and was among the first millionaires in the Crypto industry.
In 2023, the Navigation Fund, funded by McCaleb, allocated about $500 million to purchase 24,000 Nvidia H100s at once and established Voltage Park, renting out GPUs to AI companies and research institutions.
He did not create another public chain, but used the money earned from Crypto to acquire one of the most scarce assets in the AI industry.
In 2026, Voltage Park merged with AI development platform Lightning AI, with a valuation of approximately $2.5 billion assigned to the merged entity. The wealth accumulated from the previous Crypto cycle became the balance sheet of an AI cloud company.
The investment portfolio left by the already collapsed crypto exchange FTX founder SBF provides an even more dramatic example.
In 2022, SBF invested $500 million in the then-little-known Anthropic, holding about 13.5%. After FTX went bankrupt, the liquidation team sold these shares in batches in 2024, recouping about $1.3 billion. Today, Anthropic's post-investment valuation has reached $965 billion. Assuming FTX had not sold its shares, its shareholding ratio would still be about 6.7%, corresponding to a value of about $65 billion, roughly 130 times the initial investment of $500 million.
The story of Cursor is even more extreme.
In April 2022, SBF's fund Alameda participated in Anysphere's early financing with $200,000, the company later launched the AI programming tool Cursor. After FTX entered bankruptcy proceedings, the liquidation team sold these shares in April 2023 for $200,000, barely breaking even.
In June 2026, SpaceX announced its acquisition of Anysphere for $60 billion in an all-stock deal. According to public reports, Alameda's initial stake was about 5%. If we completely ignore the dilution from Anysphere's subsequent financing, the paper value of this stake could reach $3 billion, equivalent to 150 times the original $200,000 investment.
This certainly cannot be interpreted strictly as SBF being an investment genius; a more accurate understanding is that prior to the release of ChatGPT, the most aggressive and risk-tolerant capital from the Crypto bull market had already begun to seek out AI projects.
When the Crypto market was booming, a large amount of capital believed in two judgments:computing power would become increasingly valuable, and software networks could expand globally in a very short time. AI just happens to meet both of these conditions.
Therefore, as Crypto capital entered AI, what was purchased was not just graphics cards, but also funding for new technologies and organizational experiments.
Nous Research is a typical case.
Nous developed Hermes Agent, an open-source AI agent that can accumulate long-term memory and automatically generate skills. According to statistics from OpenRouter, Hermes Agent Token's invocation volume is number one globally, exceeding Claude Code.
In 2025, the Crypto investment institution Paradigm led a $50 million Series A financing for Nous Research.
According to reports at the time, this financing corresponds to a valuation of about $1 billion for its yet-to-be-issued Token. Previous investors in Nous also included crypto VC Distributed Global and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
In addition to Hermes, Nous is also developing Psyche, a distributed model training network built on Solana.
Traditional AI labs need to concentrate large amounts of GPUs in the same data center. Psyche aims to validate another route: connecting GPUs dispersed across different regions and belonging to different participants to collectively train models, then coordinating training progress, verifying participants, and distributing rewards through smart contracts.
At this stage, Psyche remains an experiment, and the testnet Token has also been clearly labeled by officials as having no economic value, but it represents another impact of Crypto capital entering AI.
OpenAI had also seriously considered a similar direction early on.
OpenAI was established as a nonprofit organization in 2015, but the funding required for cutting-edge models soon exceeded what the donation model could support. By the end of 2017, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had begun discussing a new financing structure, one option of which was token issuance.
Later, publicly released internal emails revealed that the team seriously studied issuing tokens in early 2018. Musk explicitly opposed it, believing that token issuance would severely damage OpenAI's credibility. OpenAI later added that by the end of January that year, the team gradually lost interest in this proposal.
OpenAI ultimately chose to establish a for-profit entity and received a substantial investment from Microsoft, but Sam Altman did not leave Crypto.
In 2019, he co-founded Worldcoin with Alex Blania and Max Novendstern, a project that uses iris recognition devices called Orb to verify that a user is a real and unique human being, establishing an identity and payment network through World ID and WLD tokens.
From Crusoe and CoreWeave to OpenRouter, Fal.ai, and Nous Research, these anecdotal stories filled with survivor bias do not imply that Crypto companies transitioning to AI have a higher chance of success.
Mining companies have left behind electricity, land, and grid connection permits; exchanges and Web3 companies have trained a batch of engineers who are familiar with distributed systems, GPU scheduling, and global products; the wealth created by the rise of tokens has become capital for purchasing graphics cards, investing in model companies, and funding technical experiments.
Crypto has not magically transformed into AI; it has merely channeled the resources left over from the last cycle to the next industry that needs them more.
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