Bitcoin miners pivot to AI power infrastructure amid demand surge

The most important thing a Bitcoin miner owns isn’t a rack of ASICs. It’s a power contract. And AI companies, desperate for electricity to feed their growing fleet of GPUs, have figured that out faster than most crypto investors. Public Bitcoin miners have collectively announced AI and high-performance computing contracts worth an estimated $70 billion to $100 billion, transforming these companies from proof-of-work operators into something closer to power landlords for the artificial intelligence boom. The economics are hard to argue with An AI tenant can generate roughly $1.5 million per megawatt annually. Bitcoin mining, by comparison, yields about $500,000 per megawatt. That’s a 3x revenue premium for doing essentially the same thing: keeping the lights on and the cooling systems humming. The 2024 Bitcoin halving made this math even more lopsided. When block rewards got cut in half, miners who were already operating on thin margins suddenly had a strong financial incentive to find tenants willing to pay top dollar for their grid connections. Core Scientific signed a $10.2 billion, 12-year contract with CoreWeave covering 590 MW of capacity. TeraWulf has racked up over $12.8 bil...