Bitcoin Miners Tap GPUs to Supercharge AI Development

Bitcoin Miners Transform Facilities into AI Data Centers

As crypto mining profitability wanes, bitcoin miners are repurposing their energy-intensive operations into AI data centers, chasing steady contracts and higher returns.

Core Scientific’s $3.5 billion deal to host AI infrastructure exemplifies the trend. Former ASIC-heavy bitcoin miners like Core, Hut 8 (HUT), and TeraWulf (WULF) are swapping mining rigs for GPU clusters, capitalizing on AI’s explosive growth and leveraging their expertise in high-density power and cooling systems.

Power Meets Purpose
Mining has always demanded massive energy, once fueling margins as high as 90%. Today, rising energy costs, halving events, and network difficulty have squeezed profits, prompting miners to diversify. Existing energy contracts, redundant power systems, and cooling infrastructure are now ideal for AI workloads, which rely on power-hungry GPUs like Nvidia’s H100 series.

Terraforming the Future
Miners aren’t just pivoting—they’re retrofitting. Idle crypto infrastructure now supports AI computation for firms such as OpenAI and Google. Companies like Crusoe Energy have fully exited mining to deploy GPU clusters in energy-rich, remote locations, turning crypto’s decentralized ethos into centralized AI capacity.

Economics and Outlook
While AI upgrades are capital-intensive, requiring advanced cooling, redundant power, and costly GPUs, the return per kilowatt-hour can be up to 25 times higher than bitcoin mining. Crypto mining may shrink to a niche sector, while AI infrastructure is projected to grow to $435.94 billion by 2032, far outpacing the $3.3 billion crypto mining market.

The shift highlights how crypto infrastructure is now “terraforming” the future of AI, converting idle assets into high-growth digital compute hubs.