Core Scientific Closes Polaris DS Acquisition for $444 Million, Advancing Muskogee Campus Toward 1.5 GW
The deal, closing three weeks after a $14 billion AMD contract, marks the operational crystallization of Core Scientific's transformation from bankrupt Bitcoin miner to large-scale dedicated AI infrastructure host.
Core Scientific completed its $444 million acquisition of Polaris DS on August 15, adding approximately 440 megawatts of developable capacity and pushing the company's Muskogee, Oklahoma campus toward a 1.5 gigawatt gross-power target. The close arrives less than three weeks after the company signed a 15-year, $14 billion infrastructure agreement with AMD — a sequence that, taken together, repositions Core Scientific from a once-bankrupt Bitcoin miner into one of North America's most capacious dedicated AI hosting operators.
The capital-expenditure record tells the story with unusual clarity. At the peak of the Bitcoin supercycle in 2022, Core Scientific spent $384 million on property and equipment; the company then filed for Chapter 11 and compressed capital spending to just $16 million across all of 2023. Recovery was gradual at first — $95 million in 2024 — before accelerating sharply: $729 million across full-year 2025, and already $954 million in the first half of 2026 alone, a pace that exceeds the entire prior-year program within six months. That spending intensity runs at roughly 229 percent of the company's $319 million in 2025 revenue, reflecting both the scale of contracted obligations and the difficulty of converting land and power agreements into live rack space fast enough to satisfy hyperscaler timelines. Q2 2026 revenue doubled year-on-year, and the company reported $80 million in profit from AI hosting even as it acknowledged a 56 percent loss on residual Bitcoin mining operations — an asymmetry that makes the direction of travel unmistakable.
The AMD agreement is the structural anchor of this pivot. Announced July 29 and signed at 530 megawatts across five campuses on August 12, the deal commits AMD to contracted capacity over 15 years and grants the chip designer warrants for up to 30 million Core Scientific shares — an alignment of incentives that binds AMD's financial stake to the host's execution. Bernstein estimates the arrangement could generate $14 billion in cumulative revenue, roughly 44 times Core Scientific's 2025 revenue base, though that projection assumes uninterrupted delivery across a 15-year horizon. The agreement brought total contracted AI capacity to 1.1 gigawatts, and it followed shareholders' rejection of a reported $9 billion acquisition bid — a vote that analysts at Needham (price target $35) and KBW (Buy, target $28) now appear to view as vindicated, even as the stock traded near $20 on August 15, reflecting ongoing market ambivalence about execution risk relative to the contract backlog.
Today's Polaris DS close adds the geographic piece. The $444 million transaction secures roughly 440 megawatts of capacity at Muskogee — an inland Oklahoma location positioned away from the coastal power congestion that constrains many established data-center clusters. Bringing the campus toward 1.5 gigawatts of gross power would make it one of the larger single-site AI computing concentrations in North America. Alongside the Polaris close, Core Scientific reported delivering 200 megawatts to CoreWeave ahead of schedule — a meaningful operational signal in a sector where delayed delivery is the norm rather than the exception. Citadel's disclosure on August 6 of a 6.5 percent stake, attributed to entities linked to Kenneth Griffin, adds institutional weight: sophisticated capital is accumulating in the neocloud tier at prices well below analyst targets.
The risks are proportionate to the ambition. A capital expenditure rate above $350 million per quarter demands that contracted revenue materializes on schedule; any slippage in AMD or CoreWeave megawatt activation will widen the gap between cash outflows and inflows at a company still working to establish durable free cash flow. The AMD warrants represent potential dilution of 30 million shares. Integrating Polaris DS while simultaneously building out five existing campuses introduces operational complexity that a company still within three years of emerging from bankruptcy has not encountered at this scale. Texas regulatory dynamics remain unsettled — Core Scientific publicly backed Governor Abbott's responsible-data-center framework in early August, signaling active engagement with a policy environment that is still being shaped. The stock fell 5.2 percent on August 14, the session before the Polaris close, a reminder that the market prices execution risk in real time.
Three indicators will define the next several quarters. The first is megawatt activation velocity: the AMD 530-megawatt baseline is the clearest public benchmark, and quarterly progress against that figure will reveal whether the construction-finance machine is running on schedule. The second is free cash flow conversion — whether the company can begin generating cash while sustaining a capital program running near an annualized $1.9 billion. The third is the AMD warrant exercise pattern, which will signal whether the chip designer views its Core Scientific position as a hedge or a strategic stake worth deepening. Whether Core Scientific can thread a 1.5-gigawatt Muskogee campus to completion without diluting shareholders or straining the balance sheet is the central question the Polaris acquisition now puts on the clock.