Anthropic has formed a significant partnership with Google and Broadcom to secure multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU computing capacity, slated to come online starting in 2027. This commitment marks the company's largest to date, with revenue growth accelerating to a $30 billion annual rate from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The massive scale of AI computing demand is now in direct competition with bitcoin mining for the same limited resources, including grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and affordable electricity.
A tracker from Cambridge estimates that bitcoin mining globally consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power, depending on hardware efficiency. Anthropic's acquisition of multiple gigawatts through this single deal, 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 energy infrastructure that miners rely on. Moreover, Anthropic is just one company; OpenAI, which recently raised $122 billion and emphasized compute as a 'strategic moat,' is expanding its infrastructure across an even broader portfolio of five cloud providers and four chip platforms.
The collective AI computing buildout has become one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, coinciding with the period when bitcoin miners are deciding whether to mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies. This decision is increasingly leaning towards the latter, as evidenced by 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. Furthermore, the sale of over 19,000 BTC from the treasuries of Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group last week indicates that mining economics alone are no longer sufficient to sustain 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 gigawatt 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, the AI rental often proves more lucrative. 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 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.