Anthropic has formed a partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure 'multiple gigawatts' of next-generation TPU compute capacity, set to launch in 2027, marking the company's largest commitment to date as revenue growth surges to a $30 billion annual run rate from $9 billion in 2025. The massive demand for AI computing power now directly competes with bitcoin mining for limited resources, including grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and affordable electricity. This deal signifies a significant milestone for Anthropic, with the company securing multiple gigawatts of capacity to train and serve frontier Claude models.
According to a Cambridge tracker, bitcoin mining globally consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power, depending on hardware efficiency. Anthropic's acquisition of multiple gigawatts, in addition to its existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, highlights the rapid growth of AI as a major competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners rely on. Furthermore, OpenAI, having raised $122 billion, is expanding its infrastructure portfolio across five cloud providers and four chip platforms, underscoring the substantial demand for AI compute.
The collective AI compute expansion has become a significant source of new electricity demand in the United States, coinciding with bitcoin miners' decisions to either mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies. Many miners are opting for the latter, with Core Scientific converting a substantial portion of its mining capacity to AI hosting and Iris Energy and Hut 8 expanding their AI and high-performance computing revenue. The financial realities are also shifting, with Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group selling over 19,000 BTC from their treasuries, indicating that mining economics alone are no longer sustainable at current prices and difficulty levels. A bitcoin miner operating a gigawatt of capacity earns fluctuating revenue tied to 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, with difficulty at all-time highs and rising energy costs, AI rentals often provide better returns. The revenue growth behind this expansion is notable, 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 this cycle may evolve to resemble infrastructure companies that happen to mine bitcoin, while primarily renting their cheap power at scale to the burgeoning AI industry, which is struggling to build data centers quickly enough.