Anthropic has announced a significant partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure 'multiple gigawatts' of next-generation TPU compute capacity, which is expected to come online starting in 2027. This commitment is the company's largest to date, driven by accelerated revenue growth 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 limited resources such as 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, in addition to its existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, highlights the rapid emergence of AI as a major competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners rely on. Furthermore, Anthropic is not the only company driving this trend, as OpenAI, which recently raised $122 billion, is building a vast infrastructure portfolio spanning 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 bitcoin miners' decisions on whether to 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, and Iris Energy and Hut 8's expansion into 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 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 energy costs rising alongside other industrial consumers competing for grid capacity, the AI rental often provides better returns. The revenue growth behind this expansion tells 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.