Anthropic Secures 3.5 Gigawatts of AI Power as Bitcoin Miners Sell BTC to Host Data Centers - Crypto Economy

The artificial intelligence industry just crossed an energy threshold that rewrites the rules for Bitcoin miners. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude model, announced on April 6 an agreement to secure 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute capacity manufactured by Broadcom. The contract represents the largest infrastructure deployment in the company’s history

Meanwhile, on the other end of the high-voltage cable, Bitcoin miners no longer dig trenches to defend their energy territory. They sell their holdings and sign multibillion-dollar lease agreements with those same AI giants.

The narrative of a confrontation for cheap electrons collapses upon examination of accounting ledgers. Core Scientific, one of the world’s largest data center operators for mining, prepares to liquidate practically all of its Bitcoin reserves during this year.

The funds finance a massive conversion of 1.2 gigawatts of capacity toward hosting hardware for artificial intelligence. Hut 8, for its part, secured a 15-year lease contract valued at 7 billion dollars whose main tenant is Anthropic and whose financial backing rests on Google. The transformation does not constitute a minor tactical move; it is the largest business model shift in the history of Bitcoin mining.

The scale of Anthropic’s deal demands a pause to grasp its real physical magnitude. A single gigawatt of electrical consumption roughly equals the demand of one million households in the United States. The company has reserved the energy equivalent of three and a half million homes to train and serve language models. Broadcom confirmed in its SEC filing that the majority of this new capacity will sit on U.S. soil and will begin operations starting in 2027. This allocation adds to the additional gigawatt Anthropic already receives from Google during 2026.

The AI firm’s annualized revenue figures back the audacity of the bet. The number crossed the barrier of 30 billion dollars, more than triple the 9 billion reported at last year’s close. Simultaneously, the number of corporate customers spending over one million dollars annually on Claude doubled in under two months, climbing from 500 to more than 1,000 companies.

With such contractual cash flow and an inference demand that chokes existing data centers, the need to lock down multiple gigawatts years in advance ceases to be a luxury and becomes a competitive survival condition.

Faced with this insatiable energy appetite, data center operators that once dedicated every megawatt to solving cryptographic puzzles encounter a financial arbitrage opportunity too stark to ignore. The numbers do not lie: public miners currently lose close to 19,000 dollars for every Bitcoin they produce. Production costs hover around 80,000 dollars per unit, while the market price remains near 68,000 dollars, a plunge of nearly 47 percent from the all-time high set in October.

The Ruthless Arithmetic Draining Bitcoin Wallets

The transition toward AI hosting imposes an entry cost considerably higher than that of a traditional mining farm. Preparing a megawatt for high-performance computing workloads demands between 8 and 15 million dollars in capital expenditures, in contrast to the 700,000 to 1 million dollars required for a Bitcoin mining facility. Despite this disparity, the chief financial officers of public mining companies embrace the shift without hesitation

The reason lies in the nature of the income. Bitcoin mining offers volatile rewards, subject to the whims of a spot market that currently punishes producers. AI hosting, conversely, provides stable, long-term cash flows backed by contracts with top-tier counterparties like Google and Anthropic.

TeraWulf illustrates this new paradigm with the blunt force of a signed contract. The company secured 12.8 billion dollars in contracted high-performance computing hosting revenue. According to CoinShares analysis, publicly traded mining firms could derive up to 70 percent of their total revenue from AI hosting by the end of this year.


For those that have already closed binding agreements, mining revenue collapses from representing 85 percent of the total to less than 20 percent. The sector announced over 70 billion dollars in cumulative deals related to AI and high-performance computing.

The shift turns miners into a sort of energy landlord. They do not exit the electricity business; on the contrary, they consolidate their position as the best-positioned landowners on the new digital battlefield. Hut 8 describes the River Bend site in Louisiana as a facility capable of scaling to multiple gigawatts. The same ground prepared to house roaring rows of ASICs will now host the inference racks for the Claude model.

Miners spent the last decade competing fiercely for favorable power purchase agreements, connections to remote substations, and land with cooling capacity. Those operational assets, once seen as marginal advantages in the hash rate race, constitute today the most sought-after inputs for AI expansion.

The United States power grid tenses to extremes that mid-twentieth-century engineers never anticipated. PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, projects a 6-gigawatt shortfall by 2027, a gap equivalent to six large nuclear plants offline. Data center electricity demand in the U.S. surges from under 15 gigawatts today to a projection of 134.4 gigawatts by 2030. An increase of nearly nine times in just seven years.

Five AI data centers will individually reach 1 gigawatt of capacity this year alone. Up to 11 gigawatts of announced capacity for 2026 have yet to break ground due to bottlenecks in the supply of transformers and grid equipment. In this environment of structural scarcity, Anthropic’s 3.5 gigawatts land like a steel anchor on the system.

The consequences for the Bitcoin ecosystem materialize clearly on two fronts. The first operates in the spot market. The liquidation of reserves by giants like Core Scientific to fund conversions toward AI adds direct selling pressure to a price already teetering. The second front concerns the fundamental security of the network.

The hash rate, a measure of total computing power dedicated to processing transactions and securing the blockchain, begins to feel the migration. Mining difficulty, an automatic adjustment mechanism reflecting active hash on the network, registered a drop of 7.76 percent. As more operators redirect gigawatts of capacity away from mining and toward AI hosting, the primary metric of network strength could contract further in the short term.


The long-term horizon draws a structure that more closely resembles an infrastructure real estate investment trust than a traditional mining operation. Hut 8’s deal, with its 15-year term and Google’s financial backing, points in that direction.

Long-term lease agreements with institutional-grade tenants transform balance sheets once speculative into fixed-income vehicles. If Marathon, Riot, or CleanSpark announce similar agreements in the coming months, the model of the “miner that also hosts” becomes obsolete. The sector consolidates as the real estate backbone of the artificial intelligence economy.

The calendar to monitor proves crucial for understanding the speed of change. Anthropic’s new TPU capacity comes online in 2027. The first data hall of Hut 8’s River Bend complex opens its doors in the second quarter of that year. Core Scientific’s conversion of 1.2 gigawatts accelerates throughout 2026.

The question no longer revolves around whether miners will continue pivoting toward AI. The relevant inquiry centers on how much additional Bitcoin will flow into spot markets during the process and how quickly network difficulty adjusts to the flight of computing power. The miners did not lose the energy war. They always owned the battlefield. Now, they simply collect the rent.