A bitcoin-mining business that appeared left for dead after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto empire is being resuscitated to serve the artificial-intelligence build-out.

The business, previously known as Genesis Digital Assets, had been snarled for years in the FTX bankruptcy process. It was taken over this summer by SWI Group, a digital-infrastructure company that has been buying up data centers in the U.S. and Europe to serve AI companies hungry for computing power.

SWI announced Monday that it has raised 800 million euros, or around $900 million, to fund the upgrading and expansion of its data centers. Shares of the Amsterdam-listed, Singapore-incorporated company rose 16% after the deal was announced, giving it a market capitalization of around $6.9 billion.

"We need capital to deploy more compute," said Max-Hervé George, co-founder and chief executive of SWI. He added that he had "zero interest" in bitcoin mining.

What his firm is interested in: the data centers in Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Sweden it bought with Genesis Digital. SWI hopes to put them at the service of the so-called hyperscalers -- cloud-computing providers such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, which provide much of the computing firepower behind ChatGPT and similar AI tools.

While Genesis Digital originally focused on bitcoin mining in Kazakhstan, it later pulled back from the central Asian country. SWI is in the process of selling its last remaining assets in Kazakhstan, a group of three small bitcoin-mining sites, George said.

Bitcoin mining involves running programs to solve complex mathematical equations to generate new units of the digital currency. Originally done by enthusiasts on their personal computers, it eventually grew into a big business, with companies amassing racks of Nvidia chips to mine bitcoin on an industrial scale.

Many of those companies have lately pivoted to AI, which promises more lucrative returns.

George, a 37-year-old French entrepreneur, started out investing in distressed real-estate properties before pivoting to data centers.

But few assets he has tackled have as thorny a history as Genesis Digital.

Founded in 2017 by a group of German and Kazakh entrepreneurs, it grew into one of the world's largest bitcoin miners.

Bankman-Fried got involved starting in 2021. He ultimately invested more than $1 billion in Genesis Digital through his cryptocurrency trading firm, Alameda Research, which ended up with a 20% stake in the company. Alameda was closely intertwined with FTX.

By the time FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, Genesis Digital was struggling with a deep slump in bitcoin prices and hostility in Kazakhstan, where the local government had soured on bitcoin miners over their heavy use of electricity.

Genesis Digital was "one of Bankman-Fried's most reckless investments," the team managing FTX's bankruptcy said in a lawsuit filed against the bitcoin-mining company last year, seeking to claw back the $1.15 billion that Alameda had spent.

The FTX administrators argued that Genesis Digital's assets in Kazakhstan were "virtually worthless," while its U.S. assets were "worth only a fraction of what Bankman-Fried paid."

FTX dropped its lawsuit on June 15. That same day, SWI announced it had spent $500 million on a major stake in Genesis Digital. Since then, it has expanded its stake to become the company's majority owner.

All the legal disputes relating to FTX and other shareholders have been settled, George said.

Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year prison sentence after being convicted of fraud.

Today, some of his investments appear better in hindsight than they did when FTX failed and prosecutors accused him of misappropriating billions of dollars in customer funds to go on a huge spending spree.

Notably, he invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, giving FTX a stake of 7.8% in the startup before the AI boom turned it into a household name.

The FTX bankruptcy estate sold its stake in Anthropic for $1.3 billion in 2024. Based on the AI company's last valuation, that stake would now be worth about $75 billion.