SWI Raises €800M to Fund AI Push After Genesis Digital Takeover
SWI Group has raised €800 million from institutional investors to expand its AI infrastructure in Europe and the US, following its acquisition of control of bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets earlier this year.
The Amsterdam-listed company announced the financing on Monday at a stated valuation of €6.1 billion. SWI is an investment holding company focused on digital infrastructure, including data centers and AI computing services. The transaction takes its equity fundraising since March above €1 billion, with proceeds earmarked for power infrastructure, computing equipment and data-center development, according to the announcement.
The raise backs SWI’s effort to turn Genesis Digital’s electricity connections and sites into infrastructure serving AI customers. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Max-Hervé George told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that he had “zero interest” in bitcoin mining. He said SWI planned to market sites in Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Sweden to hyperscale cloud providers and was selling Genesis Digital’s last three small mining sites in Kazakhstan.
SWI did not identify the institutional investors in its announcement. It issued ordinary shares in several series, taking the total outstanding to about 558.4 million and increasing its free float to approximately 20%. Certain investors received options linked to equity-capital-market milestones, though the company did not disclose detailed terms.
The Genesis Digital takeover unfolded in stages. SWI announced a $500 million initial investment on June 15, when it described the business as holding 1.3 gigawatts of energized and approved grid connections across 15 facilities. It said from the outset that it intended to shift the assets toward AI and high-performance computing.
In July, SWI agreed to acquire another 4.4% interest from funds managed by Stone Ridge Asset Management. Its September half-year report said it had obtained control with approximately 70% of voting rights after June 30. Genesis Digital has since been renamed SWI Digital.
The acquisition also brought a business with ties to the collapse of FTX. Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, invested about $1.15 billion in Genesis Digital between August 2021 and April 2022. The FTX Recovery Trust subsequently sued to recover the money, alleging that the investments used misappropriated funds and were made at inflated prices. The trust dropped all claims with prejudice on June 15, the same day SWI announced its initial acquisition.
SWI’s latest disclosures put its US-focused platform’s secured grid connections at approximately 1.2 gigawatts, alongside about 2.3 gigawatts of planned capacity at its European AiOnX business. Those figures describe power access and a development pipeline, rather than operating AI computing capacity. The company said it was converting suitable mining sites and building an in-house AI cloud platform.
