Editorial illustration for: Core Scientific Plans 1.5-Gigawatt Expansion at Oklahoma Campus

Core Scientific Plans 1.5-Gigawatt Expansion at Oklahoma Campus

Core Scientific announced plans Thursday to expand its Muskogee, Oklahoma campus to 1.5 gigawatts of gross power capacity, a scale that would rank the site among the largest digital infrastructure facilities in the United States. The announcement came within hours of the company releasing its Q1 2026 earnings, compounding a signal that management is accelerating its shift from bitcoin mining to AI compute hosting.

Scale of the Oklahoma Build-Out

Core Scientific (CORZ) published the Muskogee expansion plans in a separate Business Wire release Thursday morning.

The company did not disclose a total capital expenditure figure or a timeline to reach the 1.5-gigawatt target in the initial release summary. Muskogee, a city of roughly 35,000 in eastern Oklahoma, offers lower power costs and available land compared to coastal markets, factors that have drawn several large-scale data center operators to the state.

At 1.5 gigawatts, the campus would require sustained utility-scale power delivery, suggesting Core Scientific is in discussions with regional grid operators.

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Background

Core Scientific’s Muskogee campus was established during the company’s initial growth phase as a bitcoin mining facility, taking advantage of Oklahoma’s relatively cheap electricity. The site is one of several large campuses the company operates across the United States.

Following Core Scientific’s emergence from bankruptcy in January 2024, the company began repurposing high-density power infrastructure for AI workloads, a transition that requires upgrading cooling systems, rack density, and network connectivity. The 590-megawatt CoreWeave contract expansion, disclosed alongside Q1 earnings Thursday, is the primary revenue driver behind the Muskogee build-out justification.

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What Investors Are Watching

No anchor tenant beyond CoreWeave has been named for the Muskogee expansion.

The gap between current contracted capacity and the 1.5-gigawatt ambition represents significant speculative construction risk. Power procurement agreements, construction financing terms, and whether additional hyperscaler demand materializes will determine the pace of the build.

The two announcements Thursday, the Q1 Bitcoin sales and the Oklahoma expansion target, together paint a company that is liquidating its cryptocurrency reserves to fund AI infrastructure at scale.

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Assistant Editor

Mustafa Shabbir is a crypto journalist at Nonce Media. His writing focuses on the operators, protocols, and capital flows shaping digital asset markets, with attention to the on-chain detail behind the headlines.

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