Analysis: AI computing power competes for electricity resources, and Bitcoin miners are shifting to renting out computing power for more stable income.

BlockBeats message, April 7, according to CoinDesk, AI compute capacity buildout is becoming one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, and this trend is happening at exactly the moment when Bitcoin miners are faced with a choice: whether to continue mining or rent out their infrastructure for AI companies to use.

This trend is becoming increasingly clear. Through its partnership with CoreWeave, Core Scientific has converted most of its mining compute into AI managed services. Iris Energy and Hut 8 have also expanded their AI and high-performance computing (HPC) revenues. Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group disclosed last week that they sold more than 19,000 Bitcoins, indicating that relying solely on mining economics to sustain operations is increasingly difficult under current prices and network difficulty. A Bitcoin miner running 1 gigawatt of compute sees its revenue fluctuate with Bitcoin’s price and network difficulty. But renting the same 1 gigawatt of compute to AI companies can generate contractually agreed returns, and cash flow is predictable.

When Bitcoin is priced at $69,000, network difficulty reaches an all-time high, and energy costs rise as all other industrial users compete for the same grid capacity, the returns from renting compute to AI are often higher. However, this does not mean that Bitcoin mining is disappearing. Network hashrate is still continuously setting records above 1 zetahash/s. But miners that survive the current cycle may no longer be as much like energy companies that produce Bitcoin; instead, they may be more like infrastructure companies—they mine Bitcoin as a side benefit, while renting out their real assets—large-scale, low-cost electricity—to the AI industry, which cannot build data centers quickly.