Remember when BTC ripped past $120,000? Every mining group chat was nothing but rocket emojis and people posting pictures of Lambos they definitely couldn’t afford yet. Fast-forward to now, and in the same chat rooms, you can hear a pin drop. The 2024 halving reduced rewards to 3.125 BTC per block, difficulty is absurdly high at over 155 trillion, and the hash rate has collapsed from $12 to a fraction of a nickel—literally under a nickel on bad days. Meanwhile, the electricity bills in states like Texas keep climbing, upstate New York isn’t any kinder, and a brand-new fleet of ASICs costs more than most people’s houses before it ever mines a single sat. No wonder every public miner is hunting for the emergency exit.
The exit they all keep circling back to? Artificial intelligence (AI). Big, bold, neon-lit AI.
The pitch is dead simple once you say it out loud: stop buying more miners, start cramming the buildings full of GPUs, sign fat long-term contracts with AI labs, and suddenly the BTC price rollercoaster turns into something that looks like predictable revenue. On paper, it’s beautiful. In real life, well, that’s the part we’re all watching.
It’s already moving faster than most people realize. Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) landed a massive 590 MW, 12-year deal with CoreWeave—potentially worth $10 billion once everything comes online in 2026. Iris Energy (NASDAQ: IREN) straight-up hit pause on new BTC sites back in April, went all-in on AI cloud, and their stock has done roughly 5× since January (I still remember refreshing their chart every ten minutes the day they announced it—pure chaos). Riot (NASDAQ: RIOT) is transforming the giant Rockdale campus in Texas into a true hybrid beast that can seamlessly switch between hashing and high-performance computing whenever the math dictates. Cipher (NASDAQ: CIFR) has just inked a three-billion-dollar colocation deal with Google-backed (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Fluidstack, which already guarantees them at least $1.4 billion in leases. Wall Street can’t get enough—Bernstein was out there in early November, jacking up price targets and calling these miners the “shovel sellers” of the AI gold rush. Pull up any chart—Iris, Cipher, Marathon, a bunch of them—and they’ve smoked BTC’s returns by triple digits this year.
Here’s what actually blows my mind: miners were accidentally sitting on everything AI startups are desperate for. Locked-in power contracts at fixed rates, thousands of acres of cheap land with direct grid taps, environmental permits that took years to fight for… all of it. CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) literally started life as an energy company, so when their CEO goes on TV and says pivoting to AI feels “plug-and-play,” I don’t roll my eyes. Texas and Wyoming are essentially offering tax credits to repurpose old sites. One analyst I heard last week nailed it: these guys have quietly become some of the best-positioned data-center landlords on the planet, with BTC mining turning into the loud side hustle.
But here’s where my stomach drops.
Flipping one megawatt from BTC mining to AI-ready costs eight to eleven million, which is two to three times the cost of a normal rig refresh. GPUs are total divas: they demand perfect uptime, run stupid hot, and suddenly you’re buying diesel generators, massive UPS batteries, liquid-cooling loops… operating costs basically double overnight. The big public miners have already raised over $4.5 billion in debt and convertibles since late 2024, just to avoid turning the lights off. Interest payments accumulate, dilution hurts, and a single bad quarter can undermine the entire narrative.
Demand isn’t steady either—AI training comes in these insane bursts, then goes quiet for weeks. Your power bill doesn’t take coffee breaks. Customer concentration is also concerning; Core Scientific is essentially tied to CoreWeave at present. Regulators are circling again, grid upgrades are late, equipment is continually getting delayed, and half of these projects have already pushed their go-live date into 2026 or later.
Still, the momentum is nuts. VanEck thinks 20–30% of total miner capacity will be AI/HPC by 2027—jumping from ~7 GW today to over 20 GW. If they actually execute, these companies morph into legit digital-infrastructure giants that just happen to keep some BTC hashrate alive on the side.
Right now, it feels like watching someone tightrope across a canyon with billions strapped to their back. The next difficulty adjustment should drop things toward 150 trillion and buy a little oxygen, but 2026 is the real moment of truth.
These are the same crews that built crypto’s spine over the last decade. Now they’re betting that spine can carry the entire AI boom too.
We’ll know soon enough if they’re visionaries… or just the latest group to learn that announcing a pivot is easy and surviving it is absolute hell.
In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/miners-are-eyeing-that-ai-payday-but-its-no-cakewalk/
