Anthropic has announced a landmark partnership with Google and Broadcom to develop 'multiple gigawatts' of next-generation TPU computing capacity, slated to come online starting in 2027. This commitment, which the company describes as its most significant to date, coincides with accelerated revenue growth, reaching a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
The scale of AI computing demand now directly competes with bitcoin mining for the same limited resources, including grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and affordable electricity. A deal has been signed with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity to train and serve frontier Claude models, starting in 2027.
Estimates suggest bitcoin mining consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power globally, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions. Anthropic's securing of multiple gigawatts from a single deal, in addition to its existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, demonstrates the rapid emergence 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 across five cloud providers and four chip platforms. The collective AI compute buildout has become one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, coinciding with the decision of bitcoin miners to either mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies.
This decision is increasingly favoring the latter, as exemplified by Core Scientific's conversion of significant mining capacity to AI hosting through a deal with CoreWeave, and the expansion of AI and high-performance computing revenue by Iris Energy and Hut 8. The sale of over 19,000 BTC from the treasuries of Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group last week indicates that mining economics alone are no longer sustaining operations at current prices and difficulty levels. A bitcoin miner operating a gigawatt of capacity earns revenue that fluctuates with bitcoin's price and network difficulty, whereas renting the same capacity to an AI company yields a contracted rate with predictable cash flows.
At $69,000 bitcoin with difficulty at all-time highs and rising energy costs, the AI rental often provides better compensation. The revenue numbers behind the expansion tell a compelling story, 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 network's hashrate continues to reach record levels above 1 zetahash per second. However, 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.