AI’s power crunch turns Bitcoin miners’ grid access into an asset
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- Stanford University estimated AI data center power capacity hit ~29.6 GW by end of 2025, comparable to New York state's peak demand, with the US hosting 5,427 data centers—more than 10x any other country.
- Iren signed a five-year, ~$9.7 billion GPU cloud deal with Microsoft in November 2025, served from a 750 MW campus in Childress, Texas.
- Hut 8 inked a 15-year, $7 billion lease with Fluidstack for 245 MW at its Louisiana River Bend site, with payments backstopped by Google; the site isn't due to start commissioning until Q2 2027.
- TeraWulf now earns more from HPC leasing than Bitcoin mining on $12.8 billion in contracted revenue, while Core Scientific expanded its CoreWeave agreement to $10.2 billion over 12 years.
- CoinShares counts $70+ billion in announced AI/HPC contracts across listed miners, and said HPC-exposed miners trade at 12.3x 12-month revenue versus 5.9x for pure-play Bitcoin miners.
- Bitcoin trades around $53,400 against JPMorgan's ~$78,000 all-in production cost estimate, down more than 34% year-to-date, with hashprice below breakeven for about 20% of the industry.
- Mining-to-AI conversion costs $8 million to $15 million per megawatt for AI-grade liquid-cooled infrastructure, versus $700,000 to $1 million per MW for mining sites—a gap miners are funding with convertible debt.
Why it matters: Miners are monetizing years of pre-built grid interconnection that AI developers cannot replicate quickly—chipping capacity has dropped 99% since 2006, but energizing a site still takes years. The $70 billion in announced contracts is backstopped by a small group of hyperscalers, so miners that strip out ASICs betting on AI demand may have limited fallback options if hyperscaler demand cools or projects slip past their 2027 delivery dates.
