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- With tech giants facing capacity shortages, Bitcoin miners’ existing power contracts and cooling infrastructure give them a competitive edge.
- VanEck estimates the shift could unlock up to $38 billion annually, generating 25x higher returns per megawatt than traditional BTC mining.
Although the price of Bitcoin (BTC) continues to be under selling pressure, BTC miners are having a boom period while tapping into new opportunities in the recently booming artificial intelligence (AI) space. A large number of miners have put their mining rigs to use in AI, amid a solid demand.
As energy costs rise and halving reduces block rewards, Bitcoin miners are redefining their business models. Rather than focusing solely on minting new coins, many are now leasing their high-performance hardware to train large language models, run AI inference workloads, and host cloud computing services. This doesn’t seem to be the end of mining, but rather marks the beginning of a new kind of mining boom.
Bitcoin Miner’s Pivot to AI Comes As Halving Rewards Drop
Bitcoin’s April 2024 halving slashed mining rewards in half, intensifying pressure on an industry already burdened by soaring electricity costs. The average hash price, i.e., the daily revenue earned per terahash, has plunged from $0.12 in early 2024 to below $0.05 by mid-2025, leaving many miners struggling to remain profitable. With electricity accounting for up to 90% of operating costs and price volatility eroding margins, miners have been forced to seek new, more stable revenue streams.
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has created a massive demand for computing power, and Bitcoin miners are uniquely positioned to meet it. Tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, face long timelines to build new data centers.
Bitcoin miners are at an advantage here as they already control large-scale energy contracts, cooling systems, and industrial hardware that can be repurposed for AI training and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
According to VanEck analysts, Bitcoin miners could generate as much as $38 billion in annual revenue by redirecting part of their infrastructure toward AI and HPC operations, a return up to 25 times higher per megawatt than traditional Bitcoin mining, as reported by CNF.
However, the transition comes with heightened financial risk. Since late 2024, public mining companies have raised over $4.6 billion in debt and convertible instruments to fund these pivots, increasing exposure if AI-focused strategies fail to deliver.
Top BTC Miners And Their AI Push
Some of the largest Bitcoin miners are shifting focus from cryptocurrency production to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). These players are smartly repurposing their vast energy and hardware resources to meet growing demand from the AI sector.
Core Scientific has made one of the most aggressive pivots, redirecting its 1.3 gigawatts (GW) of capacity toward AI hosting after emerging from bankruptcy. The company recently secured a $10.2 billion contract with CoreWeave for long-term AI compute services.
Iris Energy has also transitioned from crypto mining to AI cloud infrastructure, scaling to over 4,300 GPUs. In November, the firm signed a $9.7 billion, five-year deal with Microsoft for 200 megawatts (MW) of AI capacity at its Childress, Texas facility, which will feature NVIDIA GB300 GPUs and a $5.8 billion equipment purchase from Dell.
Hut 8 Mining launched Highrise AI, a new subsidiary equipped with more than 1,000 NVIDIA H100/H200 GPUs. The initiative includes a $40 million GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) investment, a five-year revenue-sharing agreement, and plans for a 600-acre AI campus in Louisiana.
Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) is experimenting with immersion-cooled HPC sites, having acquired a 64% stake in Exaion for $168 million in August. The company is piloting several HPC and AI joint ventures, including the MPLX project in West Texas.
Riot Platforms, another industry heavyweight, has paused its planned 600 MW Bitcoin mining expansion, redirecting its efforts toward developing AI and HPC infrastructure at the same site.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin miner Bitdeer is making a decisive entry into the AI space, converting its 100 MW Wyoming mining facility into an AI data center and securing an additional 285 MW site in Texas to support future expansion.
