Anthropic has announced its largest partnership to date with Google and Broadcom, securing multiple gigawatts of next-generation computing capacity set to come online in 2027. This move accelerates Anthropic's revenue growth, which has jumped to a $30 billion annual rate from $9 billion by the end of 2025. The scale of AI computing demand is now directly competing with bitcoin mining for the same limited resources, including grid connections, land permits, cooling systems, and affordable electricity.
Anthropic's commitment to train and serve frontier Claude models with Google and Broadcom underscores the growing rivalry for energy infrastructure between AI and bitcoin mining. Estimates suggest bitcoin mining consumes roughly 13 to 25 gigawatts of power globally, depending on hardware efficiency. The rapid expansion of AI compute, as seen with Anthropic and other companies like OpenAI, represents a significant new source of electricity demand, coinciding with bitcoin miners' decisions on whether to mine or rent their infrastructure to AI firms.
Many miners, such as Core Scientific, Iris Energy, and Hut 8, are opting to convert their capacity to AI hosting, citing more predictable and lucrative cash flows compared to mining revenues that fluctuate with bitcoin prices and network difficulty. While the hashrate of the bitcoin network continues to reach record levels, the future of mining may involve miners evolving into infrastructure companies that rent their assets to AI firms, leveraging their access to cheap power at scale.