The company called it its most significant commitment to date amid accelerating revenue growth to an annualized pace of $30 billion from $9 billion at the end of 2025, coindesk.com wrote.
The scale of demand for computing power for artificial intelligence now directly competes with bitcoin mining for the same limited resources – grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure and cheap electricity.
Cambridge University Tracker estimates that bitcoin mining consumes roughly 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power worldwide, depending on assumptions about equipment efficiency.
Anthropic, which has provided several gigawatts from a single transaction, on top of the power already available on AWS Trainium, Google TPU and Nvidia GPUs, demonstrates how quickly AI is becoming a peer-to-peer competitor for the same power infrastructure that miners depend on.
“Strategic Moat.”
And Anthropic is just one company. OpenAI, which last week raised $122 billion and characterized its computing power as a “strategic moat,” is building an even broader infrastructure spanning five cloud providers and four chip platforms.
The combined expansion of artificial intelligence computing power is now one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, occurring at the same time bitcoin miners are deciding whether to mine or rent out their infrastructure to AI companies.
Volatility or steady income?
A bitcoin miner with one gigapad of capacity earns an income that fluctuates depending on the price of bitcoin and the complexity of the network. The same gigapad leased to an AI company generates revenue at a contracted rate with predictable cash flows.
With the bitcoin price at $69,000, network complexity at absolute highs, and rising energy costs along with other industrial users competing for the same grid power, AI rentals often generate more revenue.
However, none of this means bitcoin mining is dying. The network hash rate continues to reach record levels above 1 zetahesh per second.
However, miners who survive the current cycle may look less and less like bitcoin energy companies and more and more like infrastructure companies that casually mine bitcoin in the process while renting out their real asset – cheap energy in large quantities – to the artificial intelligence industry, which is running out of time to build data centers at the speed needed.
