Anthropic has announced a significant partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU compute capacity, slated to come online starting in 2027. This commitment marks the company's largest to date, with revenue growth accelerating to a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The substantial scale of AI compute demand is now directly competing with bitcoin mining for the same limited resources, including grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and affordable electricity. According to a Cambridge tracker, bitcoin mining globally consumes roughly 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions.
Anthropic's securing of multiple gigawatts from this single deal, in addition to its existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, demonstrates the rapid growth of AI as a peer-level competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners rely on. Furthermore, OpenAI, which recently raised $122 billion and emphasized compute as a 'strategic moat,' is expanding its infrastructure portfolio across five cloud providers and four chip platforms. The aggregate AI compute buildout has become one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, coinciding with bitcoin miners' decisions on whether to mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies.
An increasing number of miners are opting for the latter, with Core Scientific converting a significant portion of its mining capacity to AI hosting through a deal with CoreWeave, and Iris Energy and Hut 8 expanding their AI and high-performance computing revenue. Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group have also disclosed selling over 19,000 BTC from their treasuries, indicating that mining economics alone are no longer sustaining operations at current prices and difficulty levels.
The revenue generated by a bitcoin miner operating a gigawatt of capacity fluctuates with bitcoin's price and network difficulty, whereas renting the same gigawatt to an AI company yields a contracted rate with predictable cash flows. At a bitcoin price of $69,000, with difficulty at all-time highs and energy costs rising, the AI rental often proves more lucrative.
The expansion is also reflected in revenue numbers, with Anthropic reporting that the number of business customers spending over $1 million annually on Claude has doubled from 500 to over 1,000 in less than two months. While this does not signify the demise of bitcoin mining, the miners that survive the current cycle may evolve to resemble infrastructure companies that happen to mine bitcoin on the side, while renting their primary asset – affordable power at scale – to an AI industry that is struggling to build data centers quickly enough.