America’s Biggest Bitcoin Miners Are Pivoting to AI

One afternoon at In June 2024, I stood against the fence of a large industrial facility a few miles outside Corsicana, Texas. Above a metal gate, I watched a bright yellow excavator claw at the dirt and flatbed trucks coming and going. A hangar-like structure with a gleaming white roof stretched for hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owns the land, Riot Platforms, was busy building the world’s largest bitcoin mine.

A year and a half later, two-thirds of the facility is expected to be repurposed to accommodate AI and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Less of a bitcoin temple, the facility is poised to become an AI mega-factory.

In the United States, an identical pattern is occurring at bitcoin mining facilities owned by various operators. Over the past 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 partially or entirely to AI.

This shift reflects AI companies’ growing demand for data centers equipped to handle the power-intensive workloads needed to train their models. Ironically, as the AI ​​arms race intensifies, major bitcoin mining companies – which contributed to the AI ​​boom by investing billions of dollars in data center infrastructure – are being forced to reinvent themselves.

“Bitcoin mining created the model for the AI ​​computing boom and the modern data center,” says Meltem Demirors, general partner at venture capital firm Crucible Capital, which invests in companies in the crypto, computing and energy sectors. “They’ve found that their cost of capital is much lower if they get into the AI ​​narrative. They’ve got the hull powered, they’re ripping the [mining machines]and their tenant brings the GPUs.

A perfect storm

To gain 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 current price of bitcoin, the amount of computing needed for the puzzle, and the cost of powering the specialized mining hardware needed to remain competitive.

Over the past few years, with advances in hardware, competition on the Bitcoin network has increased at an exponential rate, meaning that earning a Bitcoin reward has required ever more calculations. Meanwhile, in 2024, the amount of this reward has halved – as happens approximately every four years – to 3,125 bitcoins. Against this backdrop, the recent drop in the price of bitcoin to around $85,000 – a 30% drop from its 2025 peak – has created a perfect storm that threatens the profitability of all but the most profitable mines.

“The economic situation is terrible today,” says Charles Chong, vice president of strategy at crypto consultancy BlockSpaceForce and former director of strategy at mining company Bitcoin Foundry. “If I buy a bitcoin mining machine today, I don’t know if I can get the money back.”