Anthropic has formed a partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU compute capacity, scheduled to come online starting in 2027, marking the company's largest commitment to date as its revenue growth accelerates to a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The scale of AI compute demand now directly competes 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 approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions.
Anthropic's acquisition 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 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 the decision of bitcoin miners to either mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies. This decision is increasingly favoring the latter, as evidenced 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.
Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group have also disclosed selling over 19,000 BTC from their treasuries, indicating that mining economics alone are not sufficient to sustain 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 gigawatt to an AI company generates a contracted rate with predictable cash flows.
At a bitcoin price of $69,000, with difficulty at all-time highs and rising energy costs, the AI rental option often yields better returns. The revenue numbers behind the expansion are telling, 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 who survive the current cycle may evolve to resemble infrastructure companies that happen to mine bitcoin on the side, while renting their primary asset – cheap power at scale – to an AI industry that is struggling to build data centers quickly enough.