Anthropic has announced a landmark partnership with Google and Broadcom to develop multiple gigawatts of next-generation computing capacity, scheduled to come online starting in 2027. This commitment marks the company's most significant to date, with revenue growth accelerating to a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
The scale of AI computing demand now directly competes with bitcoin mining for the same limited resources, including grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and affordable electricity. A Cambridge tracker estimates that bitcoin mining consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power globally, 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 growth of AI as a peer-level competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners rely on.
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 to either 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 through a deal with CoreWeave, and the expansion of AI and high-performance computing revenue by Iris Energy and Hut 8. 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 Claude has doubled from 500 to over 1,000 in less than two months. While this shift 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 – affordable power at scale – to an AI industry struggling to build data centers quickly enough.