One afternoon in June 2024, I stood up against the fence of a sprawling industrial facility a few miles outside of Corsicana, Texas. Over a metal gate, I watched a bright yellow excavator claw at the dirt and flatbed trucks shuttle to and fro. A hangar-like structure with a gleaming white roof stretched hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owned the plot, Riot Platforms, was busily constructing the world’s largest bitcoin mine.
A year and a half later, a projected two-thirds of the facility is being repurposed to accommodate AI and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Less a temple to bitcoin, the facility is poised to become an AI megafactory.
Across the US, an identical pattern is playing out at bitcoin mining facilities owned by a variety of operators. In the last 18 months, at least eight other publicly traded bitcoin mining companies—Bitfarms, Core Scientific, Riot, IREN, TeraWulf, CleanSpark, Bit Digital, MARA Holdings, and Cipher Mining—have announced plans to pivot either partly or wholly to AI.
The change reflects rabid demand among AI companies for data centers equipped to handle the energy-intensive workloads required to train their models. Ironically, as the AI arms race intensifies, large-scale bitcoin mining firms—which contributed to the AI boom by pouring billions of dollars into data center infrastructure—are being forced to reinvent themselves.
“Bitcoin mining created the blueprint for the AI compute boom and the modern data center,” says Meltem Demirors, general partner at the VC firm Crucible Capital, which invests in companies in the crypto, compute, and energy sectors. “They have found that their cost of capital is much lower if they go into the AI narrative. They have the powered shell, they’re ripping out the [mining machines], and their tenant is bringing the GPUs.”
A Perfect Storm
To win the right to process a batch of bitcoin transactions and claim the associated reward, mining companies compete to solve a computational puzzle. The profitability of a mining operation depends largely on the going price of bitcoin, the amount of compute thrown at the puzzle, and the cost of powering the specialized mining hardware necessary to remain competitive.
In the last few years, with advances in hardware, the amount of competition on the bitcoin network has increased at an exponential rate, meaning that winning a bitcoin reward has required ever more compute. In 2024, meanwhile, the size of that reward fell by half—as happens roughly every four years—to 3.125 bitcoin. Against that backdrop, the recent decline in the price of bitcoin to around $85,000—a 30 percent drop from its 2025 peak—has created a perfect storm that threatens the profitability of all but the most cost-efficient mines.
“The economics are terrible today,” says Charles Chong, VP of strategy at the crypto advisory firm BlockSpaceForce and former director of strategy at the bitcoin mining company Foundry. “If I buy a bitcoin mining machine today, I don’t know if I can make the money back.”
Read the full article here
