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Block CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed support for review, independent evaluation, and planning of frontier AI, but opposes governments and leading AI companies negotiating industry-wide development restrictions.He advocates for an open-release approach that allows outside parties to reproduce results, identify problems, and develop alternatives, and supports providing models, computing power, and public infrastructure to independent researchers and safety researchers.Block is developing open-source AI tools and provides Bitcoin-related services across products including Square and Cash App. The company has also launched the open-source AI agent goose, and is developing Bitcoin mining hardware Proto and hardware wallet Bitkey. (Bitcoin.com News)
data center operator Core Scientific disclosed in its second-quarter regulatory filing that it paid $41.9 million to terminate the Bitcoin mining machine contract with Block and its Proto division, with related losses amounting to $41.9 million. Both the agreement and future equipment deliveries have been canceled. The agreement, announced in July 2024, originally called for Proto to supply 3nm mining chips, corresponding to approximately 15 EH/s in hashrate, and included options for additional purchases. Core Scientific stated that it will no longer invest in new mining machines to maintain or expand hashrate, will generate cash flow from existing mining machines, and will sell or retire machines as appropriate. Core Scientific's second-quarter hosting revenue increased from $10.6 million in the same period last year to $137 million, accounting for 83% of total revenue; self-mining revenue fell 66% year-over-year to $21.5 million, representing 13% of total revenue. The company stated that quarterly Bitcoin production decreased by 53% year-over-year, and it continues to shift power from mining equipment to high-density computing systems such as GPUs.