Core Scientific, Inc. is an operator of purpose-built facilities for digital asset mining and a provider of blockchain infrastructure, software solutions and services.
The company employs its own large fleet of computers (miners), primarily manufactured by Bitmain Technologies Limited (Bitmain), to earn bitcoin for its own account and provide hosting services for large bitcoin mining customers at its seven operational data centers in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota and Texas. Th...
Core Scientific, Inc. is an operator of purpose-built facilities for digital asset mining and a provider of blockchain infrastructure, software solutions and services.
The company employs its own large fleet of computers (miners), primarily manufactured by Bitmain Technologies Limited (Bitmain), to earn bitcoin for its own account and provide hosting services for large bitcoin mining customers at its seven operational data centers in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota and Texas. The company derives the majority of its revenue from earning bitcoin for its own account (self-mining).
As of December 31, 2023, the company is one of the largest blockchain data center, digital asset mining and hosting service providers in North America, with an average hourly operating power demand of approximately 592 megawatts (MW) for the year. As of December 31, 2023, the company had secured approximately 1,198 MW of contracted power capacity at its sites.
The company’s existing, completed facilities lever its specialized construction proficiency by employing high-density, low-cost engineering and power designs. The company’s proprietary thermodynamic system manages heat and airflow to deliver best-in-class uptime and, ultimately, increasing earned mining rewards to it and its customers. The company continues to refine and develop its data center design and technology solutions to optimize its data center and mining operations with the knowledge gained from its digital asset mining experience. The company’s proprietary technology uniquely enables its scaled and geographically distributed operation.
Strategy
The company intends to strategically develop the infrastructure necessary to support business growth and profitability, and pursue adjacent high-value compute opportunities that lever its mining expertise and capabilities.
Operations and Solutions
As one of the largest owner operators of infrastructure for digital asset mining in North America, the company focuses primarily on earning bitcoin through mining and selling the bitcoin generated for cash and activities directly related to growing its mining capabilities (increasing the number of bitcoin mined) and enhancing efficiencies in its operations. The company’s growing bitcoin mining operation focuses on the generation of bitcoin by solving complex cryptographic algorithms to validate transactions on the Bitcoin network blockchain, which is commonly referred to as mining. The company’s bitcoin self-mining activity competes with myriad mining operations throughout the world to complete new blocks in the blockchain and earn the reward in the form of bitcoin. The terms of the company’s debt agreements require that it sells its digital assets, including bitcoin, as it receives them, and it typically uses the proceeds to fund its growth strategies or for general corporate purposes. The company also provides hosting services for large bitcoin mining customers at its seven operational data centers in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota and Texas.
Segments
The company operates in two segments: Mining consisting of bitcoin mining for its own account, and Hosting consisting of its third-party hosting business.
Mining
This segment generates revenue from operating the company’s own mining computers as part of a pool of users that process transactions conducted on one or more blockchain networks. In exchange for this activity, the company receives digital assets in the form of bitcoin.
Hosting
This segment provides a full suite of services to digital asset mining customers. As part of these hosting services, the company provides deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, optimization and maintenance of its customers’ digital asset mining equipment and provides necessary electrical power and repair and other infrastructure services necessary to operate, maintain and efficiently earn digital assets.
The company’s Hosting operation segment generates revenue through the sale of electricity-based consumption contracts for its hosting services which are recurring in nature. During 2022, the company’s Hosting segment also included sales of mining equipment to customers and was referred to as Hosting and Equipment Sales. The company derived equipment sales revenue from its ability to lever its partnerships with leading equipment manufacturers to secure equipment in advance, which it then sold to its customers when they were unable to obtain them otherwise.
Mining Equipment
The company owns and hosts specialized mining computers configured for the purpose of validating transactions on the Bitcoin network. Substantially all of the miners the company owns and hosts were manufactured by Bitmain and incorporate application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips specialized to solve blocks on the bitcoin blockchains using the 256-bit secure hashing algorithm (SHA-256) in return for bitcoin digital asset rewards.
The company has entered into agreements with mining equipment manufacturers to supply mining equipment for its digital asset mining operations. The majority of the company’s purchases are made on multi-month contracts with installment payments due in advance of scheduled deliveries. Delivery schedules have ranged from one month to twelve months. The company has two active purchase agreements with Bitmain. The first agreement is for the acquisition of Antminer S19J XP miners with a combined exahash of 4.08 or 28,400 miners to be delivered from the fourth quarter of 2023 through early 2024. The company improved its average self-mining fleet energy efficiency to 27.94 joules per terahash as of December 31, 2023.
As of December 31, 2023, the company had deployed approximately 209,100 bitcoin miners, which number consists of approximately 158,000 self-miners and approximately 51,100 hosted miners, which represented 16.9 exahash per second (EH/s) and 6.3 EH/s for self-miners and hosted miners, respectively.
Intellectual Property
The company has filed over 120 patent applications in technologies, such as blockchain, data center management, infrastructure and cooling.
History
Core Scientific, Inc. was founded in 2017.