Anthropic has unveiled a landmark partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU compute capacity, slated to come online in 2027, marking the company's largest commitment to date, with revenue growth accelerating to a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion at the end of 2025. This massive 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 procurement of multiple gigawatts from a single deal, in addition to its existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, highlights 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 building across an even broader infrastructure portfolio spanning 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.
This decision is increasingly favoring the latter, as Core Scientific converted a significant portion of its mining capacity to AI hosting through a deal with CoreWeave, while Iris Energy and Hut 8 have expanded 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 not 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 the same gigawatt rented to an AI company earns a contracted rate with predictable cash flows.
At $69,000 bitcoin with difficulty at all-time highs and energy costs rising alongside other industrial consumers competing for the same grid capacity, the AI rental often yields better returns. 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, cheap power at scale, to an AI industry that is struggling to build data centers quickly enough.