Anthropic has announced a landmark partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure multiple gigawatts of next-generation computing capacity, set to come online by 2027. This significant commitment marks a major milestone for the company, which has seen its revenue growth accelerate to a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion at 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 infrastructure, and affordable electricity. According to a Cambridge tracker, bitcoin mining consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power globally, depending on hardware efficiency.
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 growth of AI as a major 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 collective AI computing 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. Many 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 sold 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 capacity to an AI company yields a contracted rate with predictable cash flows. At a bitcoin price of $69,000 and record-high difficulty levels, with energy costs rising alongside other industrial consumers competing for the same grid capacity, the AI rental often provides 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 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.