Author: Xiaobing, Deep Tide TechFlow

In Abilene, Texas, on a construction site of approximately 1,000 acres, eight H-shaped data centers are being gradually put into operation.

This is the first large campus of OpenAI's "Stargate" project.

The entire project is planned for a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts. The first two buildings are already online, and the remaining buildings are still under construction. The park is operated by Oracle, and the developer behind it is Crusoe, but it originally focused on Bitcoin mining. Founder Chase Lochmiller was formerly a partner at the crypto fund Polychain Capital. In 2018, he and his childhood friend Cully Cavness discovered that US oil fields were burning large amounts of untransportable associated natural gas every day. The two moved power generation equipment and mining rigs to the wellhead, using the gas that would otherwise be wasted to mine Bitcoin. The business logic was simple: find electricity in remote areas and convert that electricity into computing power in a very short time. Seven years later, their client shifted from the Bitcoin network to OpenAI. In 2025, Crusoe sold its Bitcoin business, which owned over 425 modular data centers, to NYDIG to focus on AI development. Crusoe's transformation may seem like a big leap, but its core capabilities have remained unchanged: finding electricity, building data centers, and operating and maintaining them. Like Crusoe, many companies and individuals have made a remarkable transition from Crypto to AI. Unlike the PayPal Mafia, they don't come from the same company or have a common organization. What connects them are three types of assets left over from the previous Crypto cycle: Electricity, land, and grid connection permits held by mining companies; engineers and entrepreneurs trained by Crypto companies; and capital accumulated during the previous bull market. After 2022, these three types of assets began to flow into AI simultaneously. Mining companies aren't selling mining machines to AI, but rather electricity. "The biggest contradiction for humanity's future is the contradiction between ever-increasing data processing and limited computing power." In 2019, Bitmain founder Jihan Wu wrote this in his article "The Beauty of Computing Power," stating frankly that this was the reason Bitmain invested in AI chips. At the time, this statement seemed like public relations rhetoric; looking back six years later, it seems more like a pre-written prophecy. In February 2026, BitDeer, a mining company under Wu Jihan, announced the liquidation of all its Bitcoin holdings to provide liquidity for building AI data centers, demonstrating a resolute shift from Crypto to AI. The transformation of Bitcoin mining companies into AI is often misunderstood as simply "converting mining rigs into AI servers," but this is not the case. Most Bitcoin mining rigs are ASIC chips that can only execute specific hash algorithms and cannot be used to train large models. Even GPUs left over from Ethereum mining farms are unlikely to directly meet the network, memory, liquid cooling, and reliability requirements of today's large AI clusters. The truly valuable assets of mining companies are their data centers already connected to the power grid. Building an AI data center often presents more challenges than purchasing GPUs; the real difficulty lies in securing hundreds of megawatts of stable power, land, substations, transmission lines, and construction permits. This process can take years, and mining companies have already completed extensive preliminary work in North America, Northern Europe, and the Middle East to reduce mining costs and ensure compliance. With declining Bitcoin mining profits and AI companies willing to sign long-term, high-priced contracts, mining companies naturally began to shift their focus. CoreWeave was one of the first to complete this transformation. In 2016, three commodity traders placed a GPU on a pool table in their Manhattan office and began mining Ethereum. After the cryptocurrency winter arrived, they took advantage of the price drop to acquire a large number of used graphics cards, and then expanded their business to film rendering and machine learning. This company was originally called Atlantic Crypto, later renamed CoreWeave. Its IPO filings show that before 2022, the majority of the company's revenue still came from cryptocurrency mining; thereafter, the cryptocurrency business was completely discontinued. Today, CoreWeave is a leading AI cloud company backed by Nvidia, and its path is being replicated throughout the cryptocurrency mining industry. In 2026, TeraWulf signed a 20-year, 401-megawatt data center lease with Anthropic, with an initial contract value of approximately $19 billion; Cipher Mining signed a 15-year, 300-megawatt, approximately $5.5 billion agreement with AWS; Core Scientific will provide a large amount of data center capacity to CoreWeave on a long-term basis; and Hut 8 signed two consecutive 15-year leases at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, each with a base contract value of approximately $9.8 billion. Following its $9.7 billion cloud services agreement with Microsoft, IREN disclosed new contracts totaling $2.8 billion 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, Bitcoin mining revenue per unit of computing power once plummeted to approximately $30 to $35 per PH/s per day, and many mining farms using older equipment or with high electricity costs were nearing losses. Mining companies, which have transformed from computing power facilities in the crypto era to computing power infrastructure in the AI ​​era, remain in the spotlight. From OpenSea to OpenRouter Beyond mining farms, people in 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 craze, OpenSea's monthly transaction volume once exceeded $4 billion. In July 2022, Atallah left the company to start a new business. In 2023, he founded OpenRouter. OpenRouter solves a straightforward problem: with an increasing number of large models, varying in price, speed, and capabilities, developers don't want to reintegrate their APIs for every model company. Through OpenRouter, they only need to connect to one interface to call hundreds of models and automatically allocate requests based on price, performance, and availability. In 2025, OpenRouter completed a total funding round of $40 million, valuing the company at approximately $500 million. In May 2026, it completed a $113 million Series B funding round led by CapitalG, raising its valuation to approximately $1.3 billion. Over the past six months, the platform's weekly token processing volume has grown from 5 trillion to 25 trillion. While OpenRouter and OpenSea do not do exactly the same thing, their business structures are very similar. OpenSea aggregates NFT buyers and sellers, while OpenRouter aggregates models, computing power providers, and developers. The former facilitates digital asset transactions, while the latter facilitates inference requests. The products have changed, but the ability to build markets and integrate fragmented supply remains the same. Some traces of cryptocurrencies are even directly present in the products. Opening the OpenRouter registration page, MetaMask is still present next to the Google and GitHub login options, and the platform also accepts USDC payments. Fal.ai is another example. Founder Burkay Gur previously worked on building a machine learning platform at Coinbase. He started his own business in 2021, initially developing machine learning data pipelines and deployment tools. After open-sourcing Stable Diffusion, they discovered that while image and video models were becoming increasingly common, they suffered from slow inference speeds, cumbersome deployment, and low GPU utilization. So Fal.ai shifted its focus to generative media reasoning. This choice quickly paid off. By mid-2025, Fal.ai's annualized revenue was approaching $95 million. In December of the same year, the company completed a $140 million Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital, reaching a valuation of $4.5 billion. Companies like Adobe, Canva, and Perplexity are using its generative media infrastructure. Using Crypto's money to fuel AI. While mining companies provide AI with electricity and data centers, the capital accumulated during the Crypto cycle enters AI in another way. The most direct example is Jed McCaleb. He founded the cryptocurrency exchange Mt.Gox and later co-founded Ripple and Stellar, making him one of the earliest billionaires in the crypto industry. In 2023, McCaleb's Navigation Fund used approximately $500 million to purchase 24,000 Nvidia H100 tokens and established Voltage Park to lease GPUs to AI companies and research institutions. Instead of creating another public blockchain, he used the money he earned from crypto to invest in the scarcest assets in the AI ​​industry. In 2026, Voltage Park merged with AI development platform Lightning AI, valuing the merged entity at approximately $2.5 billion. The wealth accumulated in the previous crypto cycle thus became the balance sheet of an AI cloud company. The investment portfolio left by SBF, the founder of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, offers an even more dramatic example. In 2022, SBF invested $500 million in the then-unknown Anthropic, acquiring approximately 13.5% of the shares. After FTX's bankruptcy, the liquidation team sold these shares in batches in 2024, recovering approximately $1.3 billion. Today, Anthropic's post-investment valuation has reached $965 billion. Assuming FTX hadn't sold its shares, its stake would still be approximately 6.7%, worth about $65 billion, roughly 130 times its initial $500 million investment. The Cursor story is even more extreme. In April 2022, Alameda, a fund under SBF, participated in an early funding round for 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 at the original purchase price. In June 2026, SpaceX announced its acquisition of Anysphere in a $60 billion all-stock deal. According to public reports, Alameda initially acquired approximately 5% of the equity. If we completely ignore Anysphere's subsequent financing dilution, the paper value of this stake could reach $3 billion, equivalent to 15,000 times the initial $200,000 investment. This certainly cannot be simply explained as SBF being an investment genius. A more accurate understanding is that, prior to the release of ChatGPT, the most aggressive and risk-averse funds in the Crypto bull market had already begun searching for AI projects. During the Crypto boom, a large amount of capital believed in two things: computing power would become increasingly valuable, and software networks could expand globally in a very short time. AI happens to meet both of these conditions. Therefore, after Crypto capital entered the AI ​​field, it didn't just buy graphics cards; it also funded new technologies and organized experiments. Nous Research is a typical example. Nous developed Hermes Agent, an open-source AI agent that can accumulate long-term memory and automatically generate skills. According to OpenRouter statistics, Hermes Agent Token has the highest usage volume globally, surpassing Claude Code. In 2025, Crypto investment firm Paradigm led a $50 million Series A funding round for Nous Research. According to reports at the time, this funding round corresponded to a valuation of approximately $1 billion for its unissued tokens. Previous investors in Nous included crypto VC Distributed Global and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. Besides Hermes, Nous is also developing Psyche, a distributed model training network built on Solana. Traditional AI labs require a large number of GPUs to be concentrated in a single data center. Psyche aims to validate an alternative approach: connecting GPUs scattered across different regions and belonging to different participants to jointly train models, and then using smart contracts to coordinate training progress, verify participants, and distribute rewards. Currently, Psyche remains an experiment, and the testnet token has been officially stated to have no economic value. However, it represents another impact of crypto capital entering the AI ​​field. OpenAI also seriously considered a similar direction in its early stages. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization in 2015, but the funding needed for its cutting-edge models quickly exceeded the scope of its donation model. By the end of 2017, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had begun discussing new financing structures, one option being an ICO. Later, publicly available internal emails revealed that the team seriously studied issuing tokens in early 2018. Musk explicitly opposed this, believing that an ICO would severely damage OpenAI's reputation. OpenAI later added that by the end of January of that year, the team itself had gradually lost interest in the project. 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 the Orb iris recognition device 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 and CoreWeave to OpenRouter, Fal.ai, and Nous Research, these individual stories, full of survivorship bias, do not mean that Crypto companies have a greater chance of success when transitioning to AI. 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 the rise in token prices became capital for buying graphics cards, investing in model companies, and funding technological experiments. Crypto didn't magically become AI; it simply transferred the resources left over from the previous cycle to the next industry that needed them more.