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Core Scientific is a company offering blockchain and artificial intelligence hosting, transaction processing, and application development. The Seattle-based company was founded in 2017 by Darin Feinstein and Mike Levitt and has raised over $115 million in total funding.
Former Microsoft executive Kevin Turner took over as CEO in 2018, leading the company's mission to be 100% carbon neutral, before stepping down on May 19, 2021.
The company announced a long-term partnership with blockchain mining equipment manufacturer Bitmain Technologies Limited on April 28, 2021, creating an agreement to purchase over 188,000 of Bitmain's S19 mining unit.
Core Scientific has raised $115 million through three funding rounds, beginning with a $50 million funding round in December 2018. The company raised a $44 million Series A in early 2020 and most recently announced a $21 million debt financing round in May 2020. Although they have not disclosed investors, each round was valued over $20 million.
The company has made two acquisitions since its founding, Stax Digital and Atrio. Stax Digital, a specialist blockchain mining company, was acquired on September 27, 2019 for an undisclosed amount. Core Scientific's second purchase, Atrio, provides computational cloud services for enterprises and was acquired in June 2020.
In January 2022, Core Scientific started trading on Nasdaq, under the symbol CORZ, through an estimated $4.3 billion merger with special-purpose acquisition company Power & Digital Infrastructure Acquisition Corp. (ticker XPDI).
Core Scientific provides hosting services, transaction processing, and application development for blockchain and artificial intelligence applications.
Core Scientific's blockchain services include hosting of nodes, cryptocurrency mining, and image rendering. The company offers facilities, management, optimized operations and a monitoring solution, MinderTM, to blockchain operators.
The company offers cryptomining operations in facilities in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and North Dakota. Core Scientific has 550MW of power under contract and uses proprietary thermodynamic management and strategic facility placement for optimal energy pricing, geopolitical and regulatory stability, and weather mitigation. Cryptomining facilities are capable of deploying 2mW per day, per site.
Core Scientific's in-house management and monitoring solution, Minder, uses data analytics and AI to optimize uptime, alerting, monitoring, and management for cryptomining. The product's firmware suite increases hashrates while minimizing power consumption, in turn increasing equipment longevity and business profitability. Minder can be scaled to 100,000s of units, does not store data in public clouds, and has weekly product updates.
Core Scientific provides both AI software and an AI platform. The two services are aimed at data scientists who want to optimize existing infrastructure.
The company's AI software, Plexus, offers HPC workload orchestration and private, hybrid, and multi-cloud AI. Plexus streamlines workflows for data scientists, AI, and machine learning operations. The service provides access to multiple cloud infrastructures from a single interface, optimizing speed and cost.
The Plexus app portal provides access to accelerated open-source and commercial applications and platforms, including point-and-click access to all major machine learning platforms, data ingestion tooling to support high throughput streaming data collection and processing, data storage and query tools, and data analytics and visualization tools for data engineering.
Plexus also provides insights into resource utilization and systems management. The tool has support for queued and interactive workloads, simplified large-scale multi-node workloads (Spark, Horovod, Dask, Ray), shared access to commonly used training datasets, shared team member storage for model, source and other artifacts, and support for roaming data folders across clusters.
Additional artificial intelligence tools available on Plexus include support for over-flow or “burst” compute to public cloud, the ability to optimize for cost or performance across cloud providers, performance recommendations to minimize cloud spend, access to Core Scientific’s hardware infrastructure, and access to supercomputing centers for high performance CPU bound workloads.
Plexus is offered through two licenses—hybrid cloud and enterprise. Hybrid cloud handles clusters of 32 to 1024 GPUs, multiple Plexus user accounts with 0.5TB each, access to the Plexus App Portal and access to supercomputing and cloud resources.
Plexus Enterprise is an on-premise private cloud solution, enabling over 1024 GPUs, team and custom app creation, and dedicated deployment of control plane. The enterprise solution also has optional access to remote cluster management, access to the Plexus App Portal, and access to supercomputing and cloud resources.
Cloud for Data Scientists (C4DS) is Core Scientific's "AI Platform-as-a-Service." The platform is built for AI and HPC workloads and enables building, training, deploying and monitoring models, without having to worry about managing infrastructure.
The service's use cases include Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision, data processing, automatic speech recognition, and super computing centers.
NLP has access to 48gb of video memory, RTX-based clusters, and distributed training via Horovod, Deepspeed and Spark 3. Computer vision applications can connect via 200GB HDR IB, the A100 GPU for 10 petaflops of processing power, 40GB of HBM2 memory and AMD EPYC CPU.
C4DS can train models in under two minutes, can scale from 1 GPU to 140 node SuperPods, has over 100 application platform integrations, uses web-based GUI for easy building, and is SOC 2, Type 1 certified for cybersecurity.
The service is optimized for NVIDIA’s DGX A-100, with support for RTX-8000 48GB , DGX-1 V100 32GB, DGX-2 V100 32GB, A100 PCI-e 40 GB, and DGX-A100 40GB.
