On July 7, CoreWeave announced a formal agreement to acquire Core Scientific, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies. This deal will undoubtedly impact the Bitcoin network, as it has the potential to cancel much or all of Core Scientific's mining capacity in the medium term. Will this affect Bitcoin? Probably not.
The Core Scientific ownership transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, once it receives regulatory approval and shareholder approval. The impact this will have on Bitcoin's hashrate remains to be seen, although all indications are that it won't be significant.
CoreWeave will incorporate 1.3 GW of energy capacity from Core Scientific and an additional gigawatt available for future expansion, a key driver for its accelerated computing plans.
“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC workloads at scale. (…) Verticalizing ownership of Core Scientific’s high-performance data center infrastructure allows CoreWeave to significantly improve operational efficiency and minimize the risk of our future expansion, solidifying our growth trajectory. Owning this critical layer of our platform will enhance our performance and experience as we continue to help our customers unlock the full potential of AI.”
Michael Intrator, co-founder of CoreWeave.
This change of company hands is said to have a potential impact on Bitcoin's hashrate, as the merger is not intended to continue operating ASICs dedicated to mining, but rather to convert these facilities to power hardware intended for training large-scale artificial intelligence models.
This is what Core Scientific clearly states in a press release, which sees “potential to repurpose [Core Scientific] towards high-performance computing (HPC) or divest from the cryptocurrency mining business in the medium-term horizon.” According to Hashrate Index, Core Scientific is the fifth-highest miner in the world. The power that would no longer be used for Bitcoin mining , coming from Core Scientific, could reach 19,700 PH/s, although this won't happen overnight.
Several of these data centers operate in colocation mode, meaning they host third-party equipment. As long as Core Weave maintains the mining hosting service provided by the previous company, these ASICs will continue to mine Bitcoin even if CoreWeave shifts to using its own assets. Furthermore, this transition to high-performance computing will happen gradually. The 19,000 PH/s represents less than 3% of the global hashrate, which currently averages over 900 EH/s. Any reduction resulting from this hashrate "cancellation" is expected to be quickly offset by the introduction of existing farms or the deployment of new miners.
This happened recently, when the hashrate fell below 700 exahashes per second (EH/s) due to weather events in Texas. This drop began on June 21st, and today the Bitcoin hashrate is already close to 1 zettahash again. This reorientation by Core Scientific reflects a growing trend among capital-intensive firms: faced with tight margins after the 2024 halving, mining is facing economic pressures, while demand for AI computing services maintains sustained (and, for some, more promising) growth.
However, it seems highly unlikely that Bitcoin's security or block processing capacity will be compromised after Core Scientific's takeover. The mining ecosystem will tend to absorb this hashrate loss without incident, confirming that the network's strength does not depend on a single player.
