The Core Scientific AMD deal, announced 28 July 2026, gives AMD access to up to 2.5 gigawatts of data centre capacity across Core Scientific’s US sites, with deployments of Instinct GPUs, EPYC processors, and the ROCm software platform scheduled to begin in 2027. CORZ fell more than 4% on the day after reversing a premarket gain of more than 5%.
According to the Core Scientific press release, the arrangement initially covers more than 500 megawatts of US infrastructure, with an option to scale to the full 2.5 GW ceiling. The deal spans five sites and includes a Neocloud partnership alongside the AMD infrastructure agreement.
AMD Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Corporate Development Mathew Hein said in the joint announcement: ‘AI deployments are accelerating rapidly, and bringing that compute online requires trusted infrastructure partners with the scale and power to support the next era of AI. Core Scientific’s extensive portfolio of AI-ready data centers expands access to the infrastructure our customers need to deploy AMD AI solutions at scale.’
Warrant Terms Sharpen the Core Scientific AMD Deal’s Equity Angle
The equity component has more structure than the companies disclosed in their press release. According to StockTitan’s reporting on the Core Scientific 8-K, AMD received a warrant to purchase up to 30 million shares of CORZ common stock at an exercise price of $23.47 per share.
Vesting is tied directly to deployment: 12,222 shares vest per megawatt of critical IT load brought online. Approximately 6.5 million shares vested and became exercisable immediately upon execution of the leases on 27 July 2026. The warrant runs to 27 July 2031 and was issued under the Section 4(a)(2) private-offering exemption.
AMD has used warrant-linked commercial structures before. An SEC EDGAR filing shows AMD granted OpenAI OpCo, LLC a warrant dated 5 October 2025 to purchase up to 160 million AMD shares at $0.01 per share, with vesting milestones tied to purchases of AMD Instinct GPU products. The Core Scientific arrangement inverts that structure: here AMD receives warrants on a partner’s stock rather than issuing them.
Contract Economics: Escalators, Lease Term, and What Wasn’t Disclosed
TechTimes, citing Core Scientific’s Q2 2026 earnings call, reports annual escalators of 2.5% per year over a 15-year lease term. Neither the total contract value nor end-customer identities were disclosed in the public announcement.
The companies also did not specify construction spending, deployment stages, or a timetable for bringing the full 2.5 GW online. Those details will matter: converting former mining sites to high-density AI colocation is capital-intensive, and the gap between contracted capacity and delivered capacity is where execution risk sits.
This deal does not stand alone in AMD’s current infrastructure push. Quartz reports that AMD separately announced a partnership with Anthropic to deploy up to 2 GW of Instinct MI450 Series GPUs in Helios rack-scale systems, and also expanded its arrangement with Microsoft to deploy the Helios rack-scale AI system on Azure.
Bitcoin Mining Revenue Is Being Phased Out
Core Scientific sold 2,385 BTC earlier in 2026 to provide liquidity during its transition away from mining. The company still holds 848 BTC on its balance sheet and continues generating mining revenue, but is progressively repurposing remaining facilities for power-intensive colocation services.
The miner-to-AI-infrastructure pivot is no longer a niche trade. TeraWulf signed a 20-year data centre agreement with Anthropic in July. Hut 8 signed a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion at its Beacon Point campus in Texas. IREN disclosed $2.8 billion in new multiyear AI cloud contracts. Power-rich sites with grid connections that took years to permit are now the asset class that hyperscalers and AI developers are chasing.
Core Scientific’s position in this race has improved. CORZ is still up more than 40% since the start of 2026, despite declining more than 12% over the past week. The 28 July sell-off tracked a broader equity market downturn rather than deal-specific concern, though the premarket-to-close reversal suggests the market wanted financial terms that were not provided.
The next disclosure to watch is a filing or earnings update that quantifies how much of the 500 MW initial tranche is under construction, and at what cost. That figure will determine whether the 2.5 GW ceiling is a credible build-out or a headline number that ages slowly.
