The Amsterdam listed SWI Group is taking a controlling preferred stake in US data center operator Genesis Digital Assets, pivoting its 1.3 gigawatt footprint from Bitcoin mining to AI compute.
Max-Hervé George, founder and CEO of Amsterdam-listed SWI Group, is betting half a billion dollars that Bitcoin mines can be rewired for artificial intelligence. On Monday SWI closed its acquisition of a significant preferred-equity stake in Genesis Digital Assets, a 15-site, 1.3-gigawatt US data-center platform, pivoting GDA's grid-connected capacity from cryptocurrency hashing to AI model training and high-performance computing. Combined with SWI's European AiOnX platform, the group claims a transatlantic footprint of 3.6 GW, and is framing itself as one of the largest single-firm AI-ready infrastructure operators in the world.
That framing, and the scale number, come straight from SWI's own announcement, distributed via PRNewswire. Independent confirmation of the deal terms, the 1.3-gigawatt claim, or any AI tenant pipeline was not available at the time of writing. The capacity figure is a nameplate, grid-interconnected number, not a count of servers already running AI workloads.
What George is buying is access to power. "Grid power access is the most valuable resource in digital infrastructure today," he said in the release, an argument he has been making publicly since 2020, when SWI began building AiOnX, a European data-center platform that now spans Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Italy. The thesis is plain. Bitcoin mining is a flexible, interruptible load. AI training is not, but it runs on the same substations, fiber, and land. SWI's preferred capital buys time: it locks up gigawatts of grid interconnect that a greenfield AI campus would wait years to win, and it converts an asset the market has been writing down into one investors are paying premiums for.
The structure matters as much as the size. SWI is paying $500 million for roughly 77.2 percent, by value, of GDA's $1.124 billion preferred-share liquidation preference, and about 38.3 percent of total equity. A liquidation preference is a senior claim: if the company is sold or wound down, preferred holders get paid back first, ahead of common shareholders. SWI is not buying GDA outright, and the release names no closing timeline, no financing breakdown, and no AI or high-performance computing tenants. Operational control is partial, and the company is keeping its options open about whether the rest of the equity eventually follows.
There is also the question of what "AI-ready" means on a converted mining site. A gigawatt of grid connection gets you a power purchase agreement and a substation. It does not get you liquid cooling, high-radix networking, or the redundancy profile a hyperscale AI customer audits before signing a contract. Across the data-center sector, conversions of former mining sites have generally run longer than the announcements imply, because retrofitting cooling and power distribution for dense GPU racks is its own capital project. SWI's 3.6-gigawatt figure is a real claim about grid position. Whether that grid position can be monetized as AI compute at the pace George is implying is the open question.
For now, the bet is on paper. SWI's group assets under management sit at roughly €10 billion across 26 offices and 280-plus employees, per the release. The company is publicly traded in Amsterdam under the ticker SWICH. The next test of the thesis is operational: the first GDA site to come back online as a production AI facility, the first named tenant, and the first disclosure of how much of that 1.3 gigawatt SWI can in practice turn into billable compute within a year.