Shares of Applied Digital Corporation (APLD), a Texas bitcoin mining and data center firm, surged 12% on Friday, as the firm announced its third deal in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Under the partnership, Applied Digital's AI cloud service will use supercomputers designed by Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HEP) and built using NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), according to a Friday press release.

The HPE Cray XD supercomputers will "enhance" Applied Digital's AI Cloud service and "efficiently support critical workloads such as AI, machine learning, rendering, and HPC [high-performance computing] tasks involving digital modeling and simulation," the press release said.

Applied Digital has so far announced two hosting deals for AI loads that could bring in as much as $640 million in revenues over the next 36 months.

Bitcoin miners are increasingly looking into AI to shore up their revenues, which have been hurt by a slump in bitcoin prices and increased network difficulty. Earlier today, Canada's HIve Blockchain (HIVE) detailed a strategy to train enterprise large language models with its GPU fleet.

"This partnership comes at a pivotal time for our company as we continue to expand our current capacity pipeline of up to 200MW [megawatts] for our HPC data centers," said Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins in the press release.

Applied Digital has developed a 9 MW facility in Jamestown, N.D., custom-built for GPUs. It plans to increase its capacity for high-performance computing hosting to 200 MW.

On June 20, HPE announced its supercomputing-as-a-service offering, which allows customers to access supercomputing on the cloud, without building the infrastructure, to train and operate large language models. It is one of the last companies standing in the supercomputing arena according to industry publication HPC Wire, along with tech giants like Google, IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC) and Nvidia (NVDA).

CORRECTION (June 30, 2023, 19:47 UTC): Corrects potential revenue figure to $640 million.

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Eliza Gkritsi

Eliza Gkritsi is a CoinDesk contributor focused on the intersection of crypto and AI, having previously covered mining for two years. She previously worked at TechNode in Shanghai and has graduated from the London School of Economics, Fudan University, and the University of York. She owns 25 WLD. She tweets as @egreechee.