As Riot looks to embrace AI workloads
Jonathan Gibbs has been named the chief data center officer at Riot Platforms.
Gibbs spent the last four years at hyperscale and wholesale developer Prime Data Centers, most recently as EVP of product delivery Americas. He has also held roles at 7x24 Exchange, Arco Murray, Server Farm, Faith Technologies, and TÜV Rheinland North America.
"With over 1.7 gigawatts of power immediately available near major markets and a strong foundation in infrastructure and operational execution, Riot is well-positioned to scale world-class data centers that support today’s most compute-intensive applications - AI, cloud, and hyperscale workloads," Gibbs said on LinkedIn.
"I’m excited to be part of a team with such a bold vision and clear strategy for growth. I look forward to helping drive the next phase of Riot’s evolution as we expand our impact in the digital infrastructure space."
Riot is one of the world's largest Bitcoin miners, but since last year has been looking to take on AI/HPC customers, following similar shifts by CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Galaxy Digital, and others.
After initially being against the move, the company said it was in preliminary discussions with potential customers in October. That December, activist investors began pushing for a more aggressive pivot to AI.
This February, it replaced three board members as part of the change in focus - including adding Doug Mouton, the former senior engineer lead of data center design engineering and construction at Meta and former VP of global data center delivery at Microsoft.
The new directors were charged with directly overseeing the conversion of Bitcoin mining assets for potential AI/HPC sites.
It said at the time that it had received increased inbound interest from multiple potential counterparties for the spare capacity, and has turned to investment bank Evercore to help evaluate any deals. It has also engaged Northland Capital Markets, Altman Solon, and others.
