AI gold rush draws crypto firms away from Bitcoin
BBC News
Crypto miners are rushing into AI data-centre deals instead of chasing Bitcoin. The switch brings steadier money, and for some firms it may be hard to unwind.
Based on reporting by BBC News — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Bitcoin miners are getting pulled into the AI boom, and the reason is brutally practical: the same cheap power and giant data centres that once supported crypto can now be sold to AI customers. As Bitcoin’s mining rewards shrink and the coin’s price swings, those long-term compute contracts start looking a lot safer than waiting on block rewards.
The list of companies making the turn is growing. TerraWulf, Ionic Digital, Core Scientific, Iris Energy, Bitdeer, Riot Platforms and Hut 8 are all shifting money and infrastructure toward AI. Riot Platforms went especially big, signing a $9bn, 20-year compute deal with Anthropic earlier this month.
That kind of move is not easy to reverse. Wolfie Zhao of The Energy Mag, which renamed itself from The Miner Mag to match the shift in the business, says many public miners will keep winding down Bitcoin hardware over the coming quarters. His view is that once a site has been rebuilt for AI or high-performance computing colocation, there is no simple way back.
Bitdeer shows the tension inside the industry. It has just announced a 16-year deal to provide compute for Anthropic, yet its chief strategy officer, Haris Basit, says the company will keep mining Bitcoin too. He sees a dual-purpose model taking hold, with Bitcoin offering flexibility and AI bringing longer, steadier revenue. And that may be the real story here: the miners are no longer betting on one coin, because the electricity and the racks can be sold to whoever pays best.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a business discovers that rented certainty beats lottery-ticket economics. Bitcoin mining was always a power business dressed up as a currency business, so the move into AI feels less like betrayal and more like the mask coming off. The only people surprised are the ones who believed loyalty to a network was going to beat 20-year contracts.
Read more about this at: BBC News
