Jan. 17 at 2:42 AM
$AMD They went to a Bitcoin miner for power.
A semiconductor company, one of the two major GPU manufacturers on Earth, needed data center capacity and their answer was
$RIOT . Not a hyperscaler. Not a traditional colo provider. A company that was mining Bitcoin two years ago.
That's worth noticing.
Maybe Riot offered the best deal. Maybe the geography worked. Maybe they were aggressive in pursuing AMD. I don't know the internal calculus. But the fact that a chipmaker ended up at a former miner's door tells you something about where available power actually sits.
The thesis was always that hyperscalers need these operators. Microsoft needs IREN. Amazon needs Cipher. CoreWeave needs Applied Digital and Galaxy. That demand alone justified the sector.
AMD showing up widens the aperture.
If chipmakers need power at scale, so might other enterprises. AI labs without hyperscaler relationships. Companies building inference capacity for their own products. The pool of potential customers isn't necessarily limited to the obvious five or six names.
One deal isn't proof. But it's suggestive. The scarcity might be severe enough that the buyer pool keeps expanding beyond the usual suspects.
That's the signal. Not certainty. A data point worth watching.
