Bitcoin mining and data center company Core Scientific has closed a $500 million loan facility with Morgan Stanley, with the option to expand the financing to as much as $1 billion.
According to a company announcement on Thursday, the financing may be used for general corporate purposes tied to building and expanding data center assets, including equipment purchases, real estate acquisition and securing additional power agreements.
The company operates large-scale data centers in several US states, including Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, hosting both Bitcoin (BTC) mining equipment and other high-density computing workloads.
The 364-day facility carries interest at the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) plus 2.5% and includes an accordion feature that allows total commitments to increase by another $500 million.
Core Scientific currently derives most of its revenue from Bitcoin mining but is converting “most” of its data center footprint to support AI-related and other high-density computing workloads.
The announcement comes days after the company’s shares fell following a fourth-quarter earnings miss, as crypto mining income dropped to $42.2 million, nearly 50% lower than the same quarter a year earlier.
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Core Scientific’s road to AI and HPC
Core Scientific filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2022 after falling Bitcoin prices, rising energy costs and losses tied to crypto lender Celsius strained its finances. In January 2024, it emerged from bankruptcy and relisted its shares on Nasdaq after completing a court-approved restructuring.
Following the restructuring, Core Scientific began repurposing parts of its data center infrastructure to support artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads alongside its Bitcoin mining operations.
That shift accelerated in June 2024, when the company signed a 12-year agreement with AI cloud provider CoreWeave to supply data center capacity for HPC.
A year later, CoreWeave sought to deepen the relationship through a proposed acquisition, agreeing in July 2025 to buy Core Scientific in an all-stock transaction valued at about $9 billion. However, the merger failed to gain sufficient shareholder approval during a vote in October and did not move forward.
Several other Bitcoin mining companies have also begun repurposing their infrastructure to support AI and HPC workloads in recent months.
In July, Hive Digital Technologies said it was expanding into HPC, building an AI infrastructure business that it expects could reach $100 million in annual revenue.
About a month later, TeraWulf signed 10-year colocation agreements with AI infrastructure company Fluidstack valued at $3.7 billion, with Google backing about $1.8 billion of the lease obligations.
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