A former FTX-backed bitcoin miner is about to become an AI data-centre company. SWI Group announced on Monday that institutional investors have put €800 million — roughly $894 million — into the Singapore-incorporated, Amsterdam-listed infrastructure group to grow its data-centre footprint and AI compute business.
The round prices SWI at €6.1 billion, and it is not the first cheque this year: total capital raised since March has now crossed €1 billion. The fresh money is earmarked for power infrastructure, compute deployments and a development pipeline running through Europe and the United States.
When the Wall Street Journal asked chief executive Max-Hervé George about the mining business he had just bought, the answer came back two words long: "zero interest."
The operating plan follows the money. The Genesis Digital sites — in Sweden, Texas and the Carolinas — will be pitched to hyperscale cloud operators as AI capacity. The three small mining sites the unit still holds in Kazakhstan are on the selling block. No dual strategy, no gradual fade: the miner, folded into a renamed SWI Digital, is being converted outright.
The asset comes with baggage. Starting in 2021, Alameda Research — Bankman-Fried's trading operation — sank around $1.15 billion into Genesis Digital and finished with a fifth of the company. After FTX imploded, the estate's administrators went after that investment in court, with filings dismissing it as among Bankman-Fried's most reckless bets and writing off the Kazakh holdings as near-worthless, according to the Journal's reporting. Then came June 15: FTX dropped the lawsuit, and on the very same day SWI finalised its $500 million deal for roughly 38.3% of Genesis Digital's equity. The package also captured roughly 77.2% of the preferred-share liquidation stack, worth $1.124 billion. SWI has since pushed its holding to a majority and says every dispute with FTX and the remaining shareholders is resolved.
Why it matters
Strip out the corporate theatre and the transaction is a purchase of electricity access. Genesis Digital controls north of 1.3 gigawatts of live-and-approved grid hookups spread over fifteen locations; add SWI's own AiOnX platform in Europe at 2.3 gigawatts and the combined group sits above 3.6 gigawatts. George said as much when the original stake closed, calling "power connectivity" the industry's most valuable commodity. The logic is hardly new — listed miners such as TeraWulf and Core Scientific have spent two years flipping power access into AI hosting deals, and the sector has collectively signed over $70 billion of AI and high-performance-computing contracts in pursuit of steadier revenue than mining delivers. SWI is just executing the same trade on a distressed balance sheet that could not do it alone.
| Deal item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Funding round, Oct 12 | €800M (~$894M) |
| Post-money valuation | €6.1B |
| Capital raised since March | > €1B |
| Genesis Digital power access | > 1.3 GW, 15 sites |
| AiOnX European platform | 2.3 GW |
| Group total | > 3.6 GW |
| June equity purchase | $500M (~38.3%) |
| Alameda's 2021–22 stake | ~$1.15B (20%) |
For crypto markets the signal cuts two ways. Hashing capacity that migrates to AI tightens the industrial base — decent news for the margins of miners that stay — but every conversion is also a balance-sheet verdict that a megawatt rents better than a megahash. And it is the same recycling of FTX-era wreckage that produced the estate's $1.3 billion Anthropic sale in 2024, paper the Journal now values somewhere near $75 billion. Bitcoin itself is sailing through all of this, holding near $83,488 on the day, even as its miners keep walking out the door.
What to watch
- Which hyperscale cloud operators take the sites in Sweden, Texas and the Carolinas — leases there are the whole revenue story.
- Whatever the Kazakhstan site sales fetch — the last three small mining locations set a live price marker for ageing hashpower fleets.
- Mid-tier miners and the €800M precedent: do their own AI conversions now accelerate?
- The SWI Digital rebrand: does the Genesis Digital name survive anywhere, or vanish outright?
- Related coverage: Binance $4.3B DOJ review and OKX $2.5B funding round.
MarketRadar take
This is the cleanest data point yet for the miner-to-AI trade: an €800M raise, a €6.1B valuation, and a chief executive openly uninterested in the mining business he just bought. The arithmetic is simple — AI tenants pay steadier, fatter rent per megawatt than a soft bitcoin price supports. For bitcoin mining equities, each conversion removes future hashpower and reads like a margin verdict; for AI infrastructure demand, it is one more confirmation that the grid-connection scramble is still accelerating. Bitcoin near $83,488 is unaffected in the short term, but the structural drift is one-way.
