Are Bitcoin Miners Slowly Abandoning BTC for AI Compute — and Could That Actually Help Home Miners?
I’ve been looking into how aggressively some of the larger Bitcoin mining companies are moving toward AI/HPC infrastructure, and the numbers are getting pretty interesting.
Riot Platforms alone announced a roughly $9.1 billion, 20-year AI data-center agreement. Averaged across the initial term, that’s around $1.25 million per day in contract revenue.
That’s obviously not the same thing as $1.25M/day in profit, but I think it explains a lot about why these companies are interested. Bitcoin mining income is volatile, block rewards keep getting cut in half, difficulty/network hashrate keeps increasing, and BTC’s percentage gains from cycle to cycle have been shrinking.
AI/HPC contracts offer something Bitcoin mining really doesn’t: potentially predictable long-term revenue.
I went through several major miners that are investing in or shifting infrastructure toward AI/HPC. Based on the companies I looked at, roughly 128.5 EH/s of Bitcoin mining capacity could potentially be associated with miners making these moves, or around 14% of a ~918 EH/s network.
Obviously that does not mean 14% of Bitcoin’s hashrate is suddenly shutting off. Most of these companies aren't abandoning Bitcoin completely, and some are specifically talking about running both businesses.
But it raises an interesting question:
If AI continues paying substantially more for the same access to cheap power and data-center infrastructure, how much incentive will these companies have to keep expanding Bitcoin mining?
And there could be another side to this.
If enough large industrial miners stop adding ASIC capacity—or actually reduce it—could Bitcoin mining eventually become somewhat more viable again for smaller and home miners?
Or does the constant introduction of newer, more efficient ASICs make that unlikely regardless?
I made a video breaking down the numbers and the companies involved for anyone interested:
Curious what miners here think. If you controlled a 100+ MW site today and had the choice between expanding Bitcoin mining or signing a long-term AI/HPC compute contract, which direction would you go?
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