SWI raises $894 million to turn former FTX miner toward AI

SWI Group, the Euronext Amsterdam-listed investment firm that controls the former FTX-backed miner Genesis Digital Assets, has raised 800 million euros to convert mining sites into AI data centers. The company announced on Oct. 12 a capital increase backed by institutional investors that values the group at 6.1 billion euros and brings total equity raised since March above 1 billion euros.

The financing will support data-center development, power infrastructure, and computing deployments across Europe and the United States, where SWI is shifting its digital infrastructure portfolio toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. CoinDesk wrote on Oct. 12 that the 800 million euro sum equals about 894 million dollars.

Genesis sits at the center of the plan. SWI announced the purchase of about 40 percent of the miner in June for 500 million dollars and completed the acquisition in August with 70 percent of the voting rights, renaming the unit SWI Digital. The company plans to use Genesis sites in the US and Sweden for AI workloads instead of mining and to sell the unit's sites in Kazakhstan.

Chief executive Max-Herve George told the Wall Street Journal he had no interest in bitcoin mining, CoinDesk noted. The stance fits a wider trade across the sector: miners' most valuable assets are increasingly their power connections and data-center sites, which can be reworked for AI customers chasing steadier revenue than mining provides.

The Genesis backstory runs through the FTX collapse. Alameda Research, the trading firm owned by former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried, invested more than 1 billion dollars in the miner from 2021 and owned about 20 percent of it, the Journal account said. FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, leaving that stake among the assets picked over by the estate. CryptoSlate reported on Oct. 12 that Alameda put about 1.15 billion dollars into Genesis between 2021 and 2022 at a valuation near 5.5 billion dollars, and that the FTX recovery trust dropped its lawsuit seeking to reclaim the funds in June 2026.

The economics behind the pivot show up in industry numbers. AI computing infrastructure could generate about 1.5 million dollars in annualized profit per megawatt, about three times the estimated 500,000 dollars from bitcoin mining, according to CoinShares' second-quarter mining report cited by CryptoSlate. Ten of the twelve public miners the firm tracked gained between 70 and 195 percent during the quarter, and AI-focused names traded at an average of 19.4 times forward sales against 6.6 times for mining-focused peers.

Listed miners such as TeraWulf and Core Scientific are already converting power access and data-center capacity into AI hosting businesses, CoinDesk wrote. Miners overall have signed more than 70 billion dollars in AI and high-performance computing contracts as they look for steadier income.

SWI brings scale to that race. The group has said its combined European and American digital infrastructure portfolio exceeds 4 gigawatts of power capacity, with more than 80 percent of its capital allocated to the sector, and it plans to develop its own AI cloud platform for enterprises and developers.

Several details remain undisclosed. SWI did not identify the participating investors, and CryptoSlate noted that the company has not said how much of the proceeds Genesis will receive, which facilities convert first, what the build-outs will cost, or when they will start producing AI revenue. CoinShares put conversion costs at 8 million to 15 million dollars per megawatt against roughly 700,000 to 1 million dollars for mining infrastructure, and found more than 100 billion dollars in disclosed AI computing contracts supporting only about 1.1 billion dollars in annualized revenue so far.