(Reuters) -CoreWeave is in talks to buy Core Scientific, after the bitcoin miner rejected an earlier deal from the cloud provider last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Shares of Core Scientific rose about 8% after the report, giving the company a market value of nearly $4 billion.
Crypto miners use vast amounts of electricity to run their operations and are being increasingly targeted by bigger peers and AI technology companies, as they try to consolidate power supply for their energy-hungry enterprises.
A deal could be finalized in the coming weeks, if talks don’t face setbacks, the report said, adding that exact terms being discussed could not be learned.
Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. CoreWeave declined to comment.
Core Scientific received an unsolicited non-binding proposal from CoreWeave in June last year to acquire all of the company’s outstanding shares on a fully diluted basis for $1.02 billion, or $5.75 per share in cash.
At the time, Core Scientific had said that the deal significantly undervalued it and was not in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.
The two companies signed a series of 12-year contracts then, including an agreement under which Core Scientific would provide CoreWeave with about 200 MW of infrastructure to power its high-performance computing services.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Mohammed Safi Shamsi and Alan Barona)
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