How the Power, Talent, and Capital Left by the Crypto Cycle Systematically Nourished the AI Industry?

Written by: Xiao Bing

In Abilene, Texas, on a site of about 1,000 acres, eight H-shaped data centers are gradually coming online.

This is the first large-scale park of OpenAI's "Stargate" project. The entire project is planned with a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, with the first two buildings already operational while the remaining buildings are still under construction.

The park is operated by Oracle, and the developer behind it is called Crusoe, which initially focused on Bitcoin mining.

Founder Chase Lochmiller was a partner at the crypto fund Polychain Capital.

In 2018, he and his childhood friend Cully Cavness discovered that oil fields in the U.S. were burning off large amounts of associated natural gas that could not be transported. They moved power generation equipment and mining machines to the wellheads, using the gas that would otherwise be wasted to mine Bitcoin.

The logic of this business is simple: find electricity in remote areas and convert it into computing power in a very short time.

Seven years later, customers have shifted from the Bitcoin network to OpenAI. By 2025, Crusoe will sell its Bitcoin business, which includes over 425 modular data centers, to NYDIG and focus on developing AI.

Crusoe's transformation seems significant, but its core capabilities have remained unchanged: finding electricity, building data centers, and operating and maintaining them.

Like Crusoe, many companies and individuals have successfully transitioned from Crypto to AI. They do not all come from the same company like the PayPal mafia, nor do they belong to a common organization. What connects them are three types of assets left over from the last Crypto cycle:

• Electricity, land, and grid connection permits held by mining companies;
• Engineers and entrepreneurs trained by Crypto companies;
• Capital accumulated during the last bull market.

After 2022, these three types of assets began to flow into AI simultaneously.

What Mining Companies Sell to AI is Not Mining Machines, But Electricity

"The greatest contradiction for humanity in the future is the growing demand for data processing versus limited computing power."

In 2019, Wu Jihan, founder of Bitmain, wrote this in an article titled "The Beauty of Computing Power," explicitly stating that this is why Bitmain invested in AI chips.

At that time, this statement seemed like a public relations phrase, but looking back six years later, it resembles a pre-written prophecy.

In February 2026, Wu Jihan's mining company Bitdeer announced it had cleared all Bitcoin inventory to provide liquidity for building AI data centers, transitioning from Crypto to AI with remarkable determination.

The transformation of Bitcoin mining companies to AI is often misunderstood by the public as "turning mining machines into AI servers," but the reality is not so.

Most Bitcoin mining machines are ASIC chips that can only execute specific hashing algorithms and cannot be used to train large models. Even GPUs left over from Ethereum mining sites struggle to meet today's large AI clusters' requirements for networking, memory, liquid cooling, and reliability.

The truly valuable assets of mining companies are the data centers that are already connected to the power grid.

Building an AI data center, the most challenging part is often not purchasing GPUs but finding hundreds of megawatts of stable electricity, obtaining land, substations, transmission lines, and construction permits. This process can take years, and mining companies have already completed significant preliminary work in North America, Northern Europe, and the Middle East to reduce mining costs and comply with regulations.

As Bitcoin mining profits decline and AI companies are willing to sign long-term high-price contracts, mining companies naturally begin to change clients.

CoreWeave is one of the first to complete the transformation.

In 2016, three commodity traders placed a GPU on a pool table in their Manhattan office and began mining Ethereum. After the Crypto winter hit, they took advantage of falling prices to acquire a large number of second-hand graphics cards and subsequently expanded their business into film rendering and machine learning.

This company was initially called Atlantic Crypto but later changed its name to CoreWeave. Its listing documents show that before 2022, most of the company's revenue still came from cryptocurrency mining; afterward, the Crypto business was completely halted.

Today, CoreWeave is a leading AI cloud company supported by NVIDIA, and its path is being replicated across the entire crypto mining industry.

In 2026, TeraWulf signed a 20-year data center lease for approximately 401 megawatts with Anthropic, with an initial contract amount of about $19 billion; Cipher Mining signed a 15-year agreement with AWS for 300 megawatts, worth about $5.5 billion; Core Scientific will provide a large amount of data center capacity to CoreWeave on a long-term basis.

Hut 8 signed two 15-year leases at the Beacon Point park in Texas, each with a base contract value of about $9.8 billion.

IREN disclosed a new contract totaling $2.8 billion after reaching a $9.7 billion cloud service agreement with Microsoft in July 2026.

According to CoinShares statistics, as of the first quarter of 2026, listed mining companies had announced over $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts. Meanwhile, the unit revenue from Bitcoin mining had once dropped to about $30 to $35 per PH/s per day, and many mining sites using old equipment or facing high electricity prices were nearing losses.

Mining companies have transformed from computing facilities of the crypto era into the computing infrastructure of the AI era, still riding the wave.

From OpenSea to OpenRouter

In addition to mining sites, people from the Crypto industry are also migrating to AI.

Alex Atallah is the co-founder and former CTO of OpenSea. At the height of the NFT boom, OpenSea's monthly trading volume once exceeded $4 billion. In July 2022, Atallah left the company to prepare for a new venture.

In 2023, he founded OpenRouter.

OpenRouter addresses a straightforward problem: with an increasing number of large models, each with varying prices, speeds, and capabilities, developers do not want to reconnect APIs for every model company. Through OpenRouter, they only need to connect one interface to access hundreds of models and automatically allocate requests based on price, performance, and availability.

By 2025, OpenRouter completed a total of $40 million in financing, with a valuation of about $500 million.

In May 2026, it completed a $113 million Series B financing led by CapitalG, raising its valuation to about $1.3 billion. Over the past six months, the platform's weekly token processing volume grew from 50 trillion to 250 trillion.

OpenRouter and OpenSea do not do exactly the same thing, but their business structures are quite similar.

OpenSea aggregates NFT buyers and sellers, while OpenRouter aggregates models, computing power suppliers, and developers. The former facilitates digital asset transactions, while the latter facilitates inference requests. The product has changed, but the ability to establish markets and integrate fragmented supply has not.

Some traces of Crypto are even retained directly in the product. When opening the registration page of OpenRouter, the option to log in with MetaMask is still placed next to Google and GitHub logins, and the platform also accepts USDC payments.

Fal.ai is another example.

Founder Burkay Gur participated in building a machine learning platform at Coinbase. In 2021, he started his own venture, initially developing machine learning data pipelines and deployment tools.

After the open-source release of Stable Diffusion, they found that while there were more and more image and video models, the inference speed was slow, deployment was troublesome, and GPU utilization was low. Thus, Fal.ai shifted its focus to generative media inference.

This choice quickly paid off.

By mid-2025, Fal.ai's annualized revenue had approached $95 million. In December of the same year, the company completed a $140 million Series D financing led by Sequoia Capital, reaching a valuation of $4.5 billion. Companies like Adobe, Canva, and Perplexity are all using its generative media infrastructure.

Using Crypto Money to Nourish AI

Mining companies provide electricity and data centers to AI, while capital accumulated during the Crypto cycle enters AI in another way.

The most direct example is Jed McCaleb.

He created the crypto exchange Mt.Gox and later co-founded Ripple and Stellar, becoming one of the earliest billionaires in the Crypto industry.

In 2023, McCaleb's Navigation Fund allocated about $500 million to purchase 24,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in one go and established Voltage Park to rent GPUs to AI companies and research institutions.

He did not create another public chain but converted the money earned from Crypto into the most scarce assets in the AI industry.

In 2026, Voltage Park merged with AI development platform Lightning AI, with the valuation given by the merging entities being about $2.5 billion. The wealth accumulated from the previous crypto cycle thus transformed into the balance sheet of an AI cloud company.

The investment portfolio left by the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX founder SBF provides an even more dramatic case.

In 2022, SBF invested $500 million in the then-unknown Anthropic, holding about 13.5% of the shares. After FTX's bankruptcy, the liquidation team sold these shares in batches in 2024, recovering about $1.3 billion. Today, Anthropic's post-investment valuation has reached $96.5 billion. Assuming FTX had not sold its shares, its remaining stake would be about 6.7%, corresponding to a value of about $65 billion, which is approximately 130 times the initial $500 million investment.

The story of Cursor is even more extreme.

In April 2022, SBF's fund Alameda participated in the early financing of Anysphere with $200,000. This company later launched the AI programming tool Cursor. After FTX entered bankruptcy proceedings, the liquidation team sold this stake for $200,000 in April 2023, almost breaking even.

In June 2026, SpaceX announced a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere. According to public reports, Alameda's initial equity stake was about 5%. If we completely ignore the dilution from Anysphere's subsequent financing, this stake's paper value could reach $3 billion, equivalent to 150 times the initial $200,000 investment.

This cannot simply be interpreted as SBF being an investment genius; a more accurate understanding is that before the release of ChatGPT, the most aggressive and risk-seeking capital during the Crypto bull market had already begun to seek AI projects.

When the Crypto market was booming, a large amount of capital believed in two judgments: computing power would become increasingly valuable, and software networks could expand globally in a very short time. AI just happens to meet both conditions.

Therefore, when Crypto capital entered AI, it purchased not only graphics cards but also funded new technologies and organizational experiments.

Nous Research is a typical case.

The Hermes Agent developed by Nous is an open-source AI agent that can accumulate long-term memory and automatically generate skills. According to statistics from OpenRouter, the Hermes Agent Token call volume is the highest globally, surpassing Claude Code.

In 2025, the crypto investment firm Paradigm led a $50 million Series A financing for Nous Research.

According to reports at the time, this financing corresponded to a valuation of about $1 billion for its yet-to-be-issued tokens. Nous's previous investors also included crypto VC Distributed Global and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

In addition to Hermes, Nous is also developing Psyche, a distributed model training network built on Solana.

Traditional AI labs need to concentrate a large number of GPUs in the same data center. Psyche aims to validate another route: connecting GPUs that are dispersed across different regions and belong to different participants to jointly train models, then coordinating training progress, verifying participants, and distributing rewards through smart contracts.

At this stage, Psyche remains an experiment, and the testnet tokens have been explicitly marked by the official as having no economic value, but it represents another impact of Crypto capital entering AI.

OpenAI also seriously considered a similar direction early on.

OpenAI was established as a non-profit organization in 2015, but the funding needed for cutting-edge models quickly exceeded what a donation model could support. By the end of 2017, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had begun discussing new financing structures, one option being token issuance.

Later disclosed internal emails showed that the team seriously studied issuing tokens in early 2018. Musk explicitly opposed it, believing that token issuance would severely damage OpenAI's credibility. OpenAI later added that by the end of January that year, the team had gradually lost interest in this proposal.

OpenAI ultimately chose to establish a for-profit entity and received substantial investment from Microsoft, but Sam Altman did not leave Crypto.

In 2019, he co-founded Worldcoin with Alex Blania and Max Novendstern. This project uses iris recognition devices called Orb to verify that a user is a real and unique human and establishes an identity and payment network through World ID and WLD tokens.

From Crusoe, CoreWeave to OpenRouter, Fal.ai, and Nous Research, these stories filled with survivor bias do not mean that Crypto companies transitioning to AI have a higher chance of success.

Mining companies left behind electricity, land, and grid connection permits; exchanges and Web3 companies cultivated a group of engineers familiar with distributed systems, GPU scheduling, and global products; the wealth created by rising tokens has turned into capital for purchasing graphics cards, investing in model companies, and funding technological experiments.

Crypto did not magically transform into AI; it merely transferred the resources left over from the previous cycle to the next industry that needed them more.

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