Anthropic has announced a landmark partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure multiple gigawatts of next-generation computing capacity, expected to come online starting in 2027. This significant commitment marks the company's largest 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 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 globally consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions. Anthropic's ability to secure multiple gigawatts from a single deal, in addition to its existing capacity across various platforms, demonstrates how quickly AI is becoming a major competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners rely on. Moreover, Anthropic is just one company; OpenAI, which recently raised $122 billion and emphasized compute as a strategic advantage, is building across an even broader infrastructure portfolio spanning multiple cloud providers and chip platforms.
The collective AI compute buildout now represents one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, coinciding with the moment bitcoin miners are deciding whether to mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies. This decision is increasingly favoring the latter, as seen in Core Scientific's conversion of significant mining capacity to AI hosting, and the expansion of AI and high-performance computing revenue by Iris Energy and Hut 8. The economic reality is that a bitcoin miner operating a gigawatt of capacity earns fluctuating revenue based on bitcoin's price and network difficulty, whereas renting the same capacity to an AI company yields a contracted rate with predictable cash flows. At current prices and difficulty levels, the AI rental option often proves more lucrative, especially considering the rising energy costs that affect all industrial consumers competing for the same grid capacity.
The revenue numbers behind this expansion tell a compelling story, with Anthropic reporting that the number of business customers spending over $1 million annually on its services has doubled in less than two months. While this shift does not signify the demise of bitcoin mining, the miners that survive the current cycle may evolve to resemble infrastructure companies that happen to mine bitcoin on the side, while primarily renting their valuable asset – cheap power at scale – to an AI industry that is rapidly expanding and cannot build data centers quickly enough.