One afternoon in In June 2024 I was standing against the fence at a vast industrial complex a few kilometers outside Corsicana in Texas. From a metal fence, I could see a yellow excavator clawing at dirt while flatbed truck shuttled back and forth. On the other side, a hangar-like building with a bright white roof stretched for hundreds of metres. Riot Platforms owned the plot and was building the world’s largest bitcoin mine.
After a year and a quarter, the project is expected to be completed in two thirds. repurposed The facility will be able to handle AI and HPC tasks. The facility will soon become less of a bitcoin temple and more an AI megafactory.
In the US, bitcoin-mining facilities are owned by different 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 HoldingsThen, Cipher Mining—have announced plans to pivot either partly or wholly to AI.
It reflects the fervent demand by AI companies to have data centers that can handle energy intensive workloads to train 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,” Meltem Demirors says that Crucible Capital is a VC company which invests exclusively in energy, crypto and computing companies. “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.”
Perfect Storm
Companies compete with each other to solve computational puzzles in order to be awarded the privilege of processing bitcoin transactions. The profitability of the operation is heavily dependent on three factors: the current price of Bitcoin, the computing power used to solve the problem, and the costs of the special mining hardware required to stay competitive.
The amount of bitcoin competition has increased in the past few years due to the advancements made by hardware. increased at an exponential rateThe amount of computation required to win a Bitcoin reward is increasing. In 2024, meanwhile, the size of that reward fell by half—as happens roughly every four years—to 3.125 bitcoin. In this context, recent developments in the cryptocurrency market have been a concern. 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,” Charles Chong has been VP for strategy and director of strategy of the cryptocurrency advisory firm BlockSpaceForce. “If I buy a bitcoin mining machine today, I don’t know if I can make the money back.”
