Nine months ago, Core Scientific shareholders turned down real money. They rejected a $9 billion buyout offer from CoreWeave, according to CNBC. Shareholders bet the company was worth more standing alone.
On Tuesday, that bet started to look prescient. AMD agreed to lease more than 500 megawatts of Core Scientific’s U.S. data center capacity, according to a press release from the companies. The stock market did not treat the news as a simple win for either side.
The deal turns Core Scientific into AMD’s landlord
The agreement covers 529 megawatts across five sites in Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Georgia, according to the press release. AMD directly leased about 377 of those megawatts, according to the company’s filing. An undisclosed cloud provider backed by AMD’s credit leased the rest.
The leases could generate more than $14 billion in base contracted revenue over 15 years, Core Scientific said in its earnings release.
AMD also secured the right to reserve up to 1,925 additional megawatts through December 2028, according to an SEC filing. That option could grow the partnership to 2.5 gigawatts, the companies said.
Related: AMD’s customer list keeps growing, and Nvidia should notice
AMD did not just rent space. It also received warrants for up to 30 million Core Scientific shares at $23.47 each, the SEC filing shows. About 6.5 million of those shares vested immediately once the leases were signed, according to the filing.
AMD framed the deal as a race for physical capacity, not just chip orders.
“Core Scientific’s extensive portfolio of AI-ready data centers expands access to infrastructure,” AMD’s Mathew Hein said in the release.
Without guaranteed power and space, even the best chip cannot ship to customers on schedule.
The market did not buy the good news at face value
Core Scientific (CORZ) shares jumped as much as 11% in premarket trading, while AMD fell nearly 5%. That split might look like investors simply picking a winner. The broader context complicates that read.
Asian chip stocks were already sliding Tuesday on worries about AI infrastructure financing and Chinese competition, Reuters reported. The selloff had already reached Wall Street. Nvidia had fallen 5% a day earlier after the Wall Street Journal reported it was negotiating to fund a $250 billion data center project.
Core Scientific’s rally still stood out. Its stock kept climbing even as the broader AI trade sold off, a sign investors read the AMD deal as company-specific news rather than sector momentum.
Even after the pop, Core Scientific shares stayed consistently below their 50-day moving average, though they briefly broke above their 20-day moving average in mid-July before falling back under it.
That gap suggests some investors want to see the leases turn into finished buildings and billed revenue before they fully reprice the stock.
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The rejected CoreWeave buyout looks smarter by the quarter
Core Scientific’s turnaround explains why shareholders said no. Colocation revenue reached $136.7 million last quarter, or 83% of total revenue, according to the company’s earnings release. That business barely existed when the company was still primarily a bitcoin miner.
Core Scientific is also closing the door on its old identity. It terminated a 2024 agreement to buy bitcoin-mining chips from Block, taking a $41.9 million charge. Self-mining revenue fell 66% from a year earlier, the earnings release shows.
Instead of selling itself to one AI company, Core Scientific is now leasing power to several. CoreWeave remains its largest customer, and AMD is now its newest. That diversification is the exact argument shareholders made when they voted down CoreWeave’s offer.
Power and land are becoming AI’s real competitive edge
AMD’s Core Scientific deal is not an isolated move. The chipmaker also agreed to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AI hardware for Anthropic and expanded a partnership with Microsoft to run its chips on Azure, according to Quartz. Raw chip performance is no longer the only race that matters.
Every major AI chip company now needs guaranteed power and physical space to deploy its hardware at scale, not just faster silicon. That shift is starting to worry credit markets, not just stock traders. Credit-default swaps tied to major AI infrastructure spenders have hit record highs in recent days.
That is the backdrop against which every new AI infrastructure deal now gets priced. The question for investors is no longer whether Core Scientific made the right call by staying independent. That case is closing.
Investors do have a concrete signpost to watch. If AMD exercises its option on the additional 1,925 megawatts before the 2028 deadline, that will confirm real customer demand behind the buildout, not just contracted capacity sitting on paper.
The bigger question is whether the industry’s scramble for power and land can keep outrunning the debt being piled up to fund it.
Related: Bank of America revamps AMD stock price target for 2026
