One of the biggest trends in energy infrastructure right now is bitcoin miners pivoting to AI compute. At least a dozen public miners have announced partial or full pivots in the last 18 months, from Core Scientific's 71% revenue shift to IREN's $1.94 billion Microsoft deal.
Sphere 3D is playing a different niche. At 53 MW operating and 100+ MW in development across multiple smaller sites, they recently engaged EA Advisors, a team with former leadership from Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, and Compass Datacenters, to convert mining sites to AI data centers.
Smaller scale data centers are an overlooked part of the market that can cater to customers other operators may be overlooking. Not every AI workload needs a 500 MW campus. Enterprises, government agencies, defense contractors, and mid-tier AI companies need 10-50 MW of reliable compute and are not competing for slots at the mega-scale facilities.
Joel Block: "Megawatts alone are not the moat. The right megawatts, the right customers, and the right business model per site are what create durable value."
The miners who spent years securing permitted, energized, grid-connected power are sitting on the scarcest asset in the AI buildout. The smaller, distributed sites may end up serving a market segment the mega-miners overlook entirely.
