From Eliminating Intermediaries to Becoming One for AI

Multiple cryptocurrency companies are transforming into AI by leveraging their advantages in power facilities, with capital flowing into AI, shifting the industry from eliminating intermediaries to becoming AI intermediaries.

Written by: Cathy

Galaxy Digital spent $65 million in 2022 to acquire a 180 MW Bitcoin mining facility. This year, the land began renting to CoreWeave under a 15-year lease, generating an average annual income of over $1 billion.

Crusoe took a more straightforward approach. It sold its 425 Bitcoin data centers to NYDIG and turned to Texas to build Stargate for OpenAI.

All three companies are making a strong pivot towards AI.

This is not just another round of "AI plus blockchain" stories. They are not issuing tokens, writing white papers, or creating protocols. What they sell are computing power, cabinets, and AI products, with clients including OpenAI, Microsoft, and CoreWeave.

Money is also flowing in the same direction. In the first quarter of 2026, about 6,000 startups globally raised $300 billion, with AI taking $242 billion, accounting for 80%. During the same period, only 8 new cryptocurrency funds were established, totaling $1.1 billion, the lowest quarter since Q3 2020.

How can an industry that relies on tokens secure a place in AI?

01 They Have Always Sold the Same Thing

Let’s look at Galaxy’s calculations.

Helios is a mining facility in West Texas, purchased for $65 million in 2022. Galaxy halted mining, invested $350 million of its own funds, and borrowed $1.4 billion in debt for renovations.

This year, in the first phase of delivery, 133 MW of critical IT load was delivered to CoreWeave, and rent began to accrue. In total, CoreWeave committed to 526 MW under a 15-year lease, plus two five-year renewal options.

An asset bought for $65 million has turned into a business generating $1 billion in annual rent.

Crusoe’s path is even more radical. The company started by generating power from associated gas in oil fields, with Bitcoin mining being the first use of that power. In 2025, it sold its entire Bitcoin business, all 425 modular data centers.

The freed-up resources were used in Abilene, Texas. This is where OpenAI's Stargate Phase 1 is planned, with a capacity of 1.2 GW. In May 2025, Crusoe raised $11.6 billion in debt and equity for it.

In March of this year, Microsoft signed for another 900 MW next door. The entire Abilene is ultimately planned for 2.1 GW.

It’s worth noting the timing. Galaxy bought Helios in 2024, and Tether spent $420 million on Nvidia H100 also in 2023.

At that time, ChatGPT had just started to gain traction, and AI data centers were not yet something everyone was scrambling for. These companies did not enter chasing a trend; they were already positioned when the wind blew in.

At this point, the reasoning behind the transformation is quite simple.

What cryptocurrency companies have truly learned over the past decade is one thing: how to turn cheap electricity and unwanted land into rows of cabinets that can be powered, dissipate heat, and run at full capacity around the clock.

What AI currently lacks is precisely this.

So those holding electricity and land find it easiest to pivot. The assets are ready, the clients are new, and only one renovation separates them.

Others are not unable to pivot; they just have to take a few more steps. They need to prove that they can do more than just issue tokens.

02 Not Just Selling Land

Tether is taking a different route.

Its AI division, QVAC, is unrelated to token issuance: it develops an open-source cross-platform SDK that allows billion-parameter models to run directly on laptops, standard graphics cards, or even mobile phones.

In March of this year, QVAC released a LoRA fine-tuning framework for Microsoft's BitNet 1-bit model; in April, it released the SDK; and in June, it made Google's research institute's memory compression algorithm TurboQuant an open-source implementation. There’s also a local AI desktop application called Workbench.

A stablecoin company optimizing edge inference sounds absurd, but these things are genuinely on GitHub.

Tether's money has also taken a more circuitous route. In December 2024, it made a strategic investment of $775 million in the video platform Rumble; in June of this year, Rumble completed the acquisition of the German-listed company Northern Data, obtaining 85.2% of the shares.

Northern Data holds over 22,000 GPUs for European cloud operations, along with approximately 250 MW of data center capacity by 2027. It raised its 2026 revenue guidance from €130 million to €150 million to €170 million to €190 million, signing a multi-year GPU cloud contract worth $270 million with Together AI.

A profit from stablecoins, bypassing a video company, ultimately turned into a GPU facility in Europe.

Crypto.com’s $70 million was not just sitting idle. Marszalek began building a team after acquiring AI.com in April 2025, with products launching after the Super Bowl, focusing on personal AI agents that can send messages, execute operations across applications, and trade stocks. He is simultaneously the CEO of two companies.

On the money side, Paradigm closed its $1.2 billion fourth fund on July 8, explicitly stating AI and robotics as focus areas. This venture capital firm manages nearly $12 billion in crypto investments and has already invested in drone delivery company Zipline and space defense company True Anomaly.

The most ironic case is OpenRouter.

Founder Alex Atallah is a co-founder and CTO of OpenSea. He left in early 2023 to create a tool that serves as a switch for over 400 large models: developers call an API once, and it decides whether the request goes to GPT, Claude, or some open-source model.

In May of this year, OpenRouter raised $113 million in Series B funding, with a valuation of $1.3 billion. It has 8 million registered developers and processes 250 trillion tokens weekly.

In an industry that spent ten years arguing that "intermediaries are unnecessary," the most successful company that emerged is one that acts as an intermediary for models.

On the other hand, money in crypto is visibly being withdrawn at a rapid pace. In April 2026, global crypto venture capital invested only $659 million in a single month, the lowest in two years, down 75% year-on-year.

Why is the money leaving? Paradigm hasn’t said much, but the LPs' ledgers are clear. After the collapses of FTX, Terra, and Three Arrows, institutional trust in crypto funds has not been restored. The projects that received high valuations in the last cycle neither generated revenue nor accumulated real users.

At least in AI, there are bills to check.

The last time this industry collectively changed direction was after the ICO crash in 2018 when everyone turned to DeFi.

That time, it was just changing rooms in their own house.

This time, they are moving out.

03 But the Report Card is Divided

Not everyone has successfully pivoted.

Canaan is a reverse example. This company, which makes Bitcoin mining machines, also tried its hand at AI chips, contributing about $900,000 in revenue from this segment in 2024. The company's total revenue that year was $269.3 million.

$900,000 compared to $269.3 million. And this segment consumed 15% of the company's total operating expenses.

In June 2025, Canaan shut down its AI chip business and returned to selling mining machines.

The mining companies are also stratifying. Those with electricity, grid connections, and ready facilities secured long-term contracts with Microsoft and Google; those with only mining machines and a press release disappeared after the announcement.

The same MW, in companies capable of delivery, is a fifteen-year lease; in companies that are not, it’s just a slide.

The distinguishing criterion is actually just one: is anyone really paying for it?

Galaxy has CoreWeave's rent, Crusoe has Microsoft and OpenAI's campuses, OpenRouter has 8 million developers calling its API. Canaan has a $900,000 annual revenue, and it has figured out this calculation.

04 Conclusion

These companies are not doing "crypto AI"; they are doing AI.

What has truly been brought over is not technology. It’s a group of people who know how to raise billions when no one believes in you and how to turn a piece of barren land into a powered-up facility in just over a year. These skills have nothing to do with blockchain; they just happened to be honed in the crypto industry.

It should also be made clear that moving out does not equal winning. Crusoe's Abilene Microsoft campus won’t be powered until mid-2027, Crypto.com’s AI product has just launched, and Rumble, after acquiring Northern Data, still needs to prove it can operate the facility.

None of these have reached the acceptance stage yet. The only thing that can be confirmed is one: the bets have been placed, and they are on someone else's table.

Ten years ago, they said they wanted to eliminate intermediaries.

Now they are acting as intermediaries for AI.