Vitalik Buterin breaks down Bitcoin mining costs versus AI inference

Vitalik Buterin has a new side project: comparing electricity bills. In an October 17, 2026 post on X, the Ethereum co-founder contrasted how money gets spent in Bitcoin mining versus AI inference. His core point is simple. Bitcoin mining costs are divided between hardware and electricity, while AI inference spends mostly on hardware. The numbers behind the split Estimates tied to the comparison put the cost of mining one Bitcoin at roughly $93,700. Of that, about $37,600, or 40%, goes to compute capital expenditure, the upfront cost of buying mining machines. Electricity accounts for approximately $40,600, or 43.3%. Put another way, the bill for the rigs and the bill for the power that runs them are close to a coin flip. AI inference tells a very different story. Inference is the stage where a trained model actually answers questions, generates images or writes code for users. The estimated cost there runs about $26,260 per GPU-year. Compute capex makes up roughly $19,900 of that, or 76%. Electricity? Somewhere between $1,050 and $1,260, which works out to just 4% to 4.8% of the total. For an AI operator, the power bill is closer to a rounding error than a strategic concern. The g...