BlockBeats News, April 7th, according to CoinDesk, AI infrastructure development is becoming one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, and this trend is happening at a time when Bitcoin miners are facing a decision: whether to continue mining or to lease their infrastructure to AI companies.
This trend is becoming increasingly apparent. Core Scientific has pivoted most of its mining hash rate to AI hosting services through a partnership with CoreWeave. Iris Energy and Hut 8 have also expanded their AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) revenue. Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group revealed last week that they sold over 19,000 bitcoins, indicating that relying solely on mining economics has become difficult to sustain operations at current prices and network difficulty. A Bitcoin miner operating 1 gigawatt of hash rate would see its revenue fluctuate with Bitcoin’s price and network difficulty. However, the same 1 gigawatt of hash rate leased to an AI company can generate a predictable income based on the contract terms.
Amid Bitcoin’s price at $69,000, network difficulty at an all-time high, and energy costs rising as all other industrial users compete for the same grid capacity, the returns from renting out hash rate to AI are often higher. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Bitcoin mining is dying out. The network hash rate continues to hit record highs of over 1 zetahash/s. However, miners who survive in this current cycle may no longer resemble energy producers mining Bitcoin but more like infrastructure companies — mining Bitcoin incidentally while leasing their true assets — large-scale low-cost electricity — to the AI industry that cannot rapidly build data centers.
