SWI Group, the Singapore-incorporated, Amsterdam-listed digital infrastructure company that took control of former Bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets this year, has raised €800 million (about $900 million) to expand its data centre and AI compute capacity, the company announced on Monday. The capital increase, from unnamed institutional investors, values SWI at €6.1 billion and takes the equity it has raised since March past €1 billion.
SWI said the money will go into power infrastructure, compute deployments and its development pipeline in Europe and the US. Founder and CEO Max-Hervé George told the Wall Street Journal that the company plans to market the Genesis Digital sites in Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Sweden to hyperscale cloud providers, and that he has "zero interest" in bitcoin mining. SWI is selling Genesis Digital's last three small mining sites in Kazakhstan, he said.
Genesis Digital carries one of the more awkward histories in crypto mining. Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried's trading firm, put about $1.15 billion into the company from 2021, ending up with a 20% stake. After FTX collapsed, the estate's administrators sued Genesis Digital to recover the money, calling it "one of Bankman-Fried's most reckless investments" and describing its Kazakh assets as "virtually worthless," according to the WSJ.
FTX dropped that suit on June 15. The same day, SWI closed a $500 million purchase of about 38.3% of Genesis Digital's shares, including roughly 77.2% of the $1.124 billion liquidation preference on its preferred stock. It has since moved to majority ownership. SWI says Genesis Digital holds more than 1.3 gigawatts of energised and approved grid connections across 15 facilities, which together with its 2.3-gigawatt European platform AiOnX gives the group over 3.6 gigawatts. George said all legal disputes with FTX and other shareholders have been settled.
The deal values Genesis Digital mainly for its grid connections. "Power connectivity is the most valuable commodity in digital infrastructure today," George said when the stake closed. Listed bitcoin miners have been making the same argument for two years as they convert sites to host AI workloads, and SWI is applying it to a distressed asset that never made that transition on its own.
It also adds to the list of Bankman-Fried bets that look better in hindsight than they did when FTX failed. The FTX estate sold its 7.8% stake in Anthropic for $1.3 billion in 2024, a holding the WSJ estimates would now be worth about $75 billion.
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