These firms you've never heard of are feeding fears the AI bubble could burst

Several neocloud firms have their roots in the volatile crypto mining industry, made of companies that generate cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin.

Crypto miners use some of the same kind of physical infrastructure that is used to develop AI.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 with a focus on mining Ethereum.

IREN, Core Scientific and Applied Digital also started in crypto mining.

Their infrastructure left them well-positioned when AI exploded in 2022 with the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

One outlier is Nebius, which was known as Yandex NV when it was part of Russia's version of Google before splitting off and changing its name in 2024.