In June 2024, standing outside a vast industrial site near Corsicana, Texas, the scale of Riot Platforms’ ambition was impossible to miss. Excavators tore through dirt, trucks moved continuously, and a massive, hangar-like building stretched across the horizon. At the time, the company was building what was set to become the world’s largest bitcoin mining facility.
Less than two years later, that vision has shifted dramatically. Roughly two-thirds of the site is now slated for conversion into infrastructure designed for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC). What was once conceived as a monument to bitcoin mining is fast becoming an AI super–data center.
Riot is far from alone. Across the United States, major bitcoin mining operators are making similar moves. Over the past 18 months, at least eight publicly traded mining companies—including Bitfarms, Core Scientific, IREN, TeraWulf, CleanSpark, Bit Digital, MARA Holdings, and Cipher Mining—have announced plans to transition part or all of their operations toward AI and HPC workloads.
This shift is being driven by soaring demand from AI companies desperate for data centers capable of supporting energy-hungry model training. Ironically, the very firms that helped lay the groundwork for today’s AI boom—by investing billions in power-heavy data infrastructure—are now being pushed to reinvent themselves.
“Bitcoin mining effectively created the blueprint for the modern data center,” says Meltem Demirors, a general partner at Crucible Capital. “These companies already have powered facilities. Now they’re pulling out mining rigs and letting AI customers bring in GPUs. It’s a much cheaper way for them to access capital.”
A Perfect Economic Storm
Bitcoin mining profitability hinges on three main factors: the price of bitcoin, the amount of computing power competing on the network, and electricity costs. In recent years, competition has surged as more advanced hardware floods the market, making it increasingly expensive to win mining rewards.
At the same time, the bitcoin block reward was halved in 2024 to 3.125 bitcoin—a routine event that occurs roughly every four years. Combined with bitcoin’s recent slide to around $85,000, roughly 30 percent below its 2025 peak, the economics have become punishing.
“The math just doesn’t work for most operators right now,” says Charles Chong, VP of strategy at BlockSpaceForce and a former executive at Foundry. “If you buy a mining machine today, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever recover the investment.”
By mid-November, research from CoinShares showed that only a small handful of the largest publicly traded miners could remain profitable at current prices.
AI, by contrast, offers higher margins and predictable income through long-term contracts with major technology firms. CoinShares estimates that bitcoin mining companies have announced more than $43 billion in AI and HPC deals in just the past few months.
“Bitcoin mining still makes money,” says Ben Gagnon, CEO of Bitfarms, which plans to fully transition to AI and HPC by 2027. “But AI delivers far more value per unit of energy, and it does so consistently over many years. At this point, further investment in bitcoin mining just doesn’t make sense.”
Investors appear to agree. Public markets have rewarded companies that embrace AI, reinforcing the trend. “These operators are natural risk-takers,” Chong says. “They were early to bitcoin, and now they see the same kind of upside in AI.”
The Pure-Play Holdouts
Not everyone is abandoning bitcoin. One notable exception is American Bitcoin, a company launched by Eric Trump. Spun out of Hut 8—now an AI and HPC operator—American Bitcoin focuses exclusively on mining and does not own physical facilities, only specialized hardware.
Thanks to favorable power rates and low overhead, the company claims it can mine bitcoin at an all-in cost of around $50,000 per coin. “Efficiency is everything,” says president Matt Prusak. “The industry is sorting itself out. Operators that weren’t truly built for bitcoin are peeling away.”
Skepticism remains about how smoothly miners can pivot to AI. Earlier this year, MARA CEO Fred Thiel questioned whether bitcoin facilities are suited to enterprise-grade AI workloads. “Bitcoin mining data centers are extremely simple,” he said. “AI customers need near-perfect uptime.”
Many mining operations are designed to shut down during peak energy demand to support the grid—a feature that clashes with AI clients’ requirement for continuous power. Achieving “five nines” reliability often means expensive investments in backup generation.
Despite those concerns, former pure-play miners have signed multi-billion-dollar hosting deals with tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. MARA itself later confirmed it had begun deploying AI hardware at one of its sites.
Demirors believes even the holdouts may eventually follow. “Executives are paid to maximize shareholder value,” she says. “If announcing an AI deal doubles your stock, most people will do it.”
Prusak disagrees. “You want to create shareholder value in a way that aligns with your core mission,” he says. “American Bitcoin wasn’t built to be a generic data infrastructure company.”
What Happens to Bitcoin Mining?
While the AI pivot may benefit shareholders in the short term, analysts warn it could weaken the bitcoin network over time. A sharp decline in industrial-scale mining could theoretically make the network more vulnerable to a so-called 51 percent attack, where a single entity gains majority control over transaction processing.
Such an attack remains extremely expensive today, but as mining rewards continue to shrink, the risk may grow. “It’s a real concern,” says Chong. “The question is how quickly it becomes serious.”
More likely, experts say, is that mining migrates to regions with cheaper and more abundant energy. MARA has already announced plans to expand into Paraguay. “In the US, energy demand is increasingly crowded,” Thiel says. “You’re competing directly with AI for power.”
Others believe bitcoin mining may eventually become the domain of nation-states such as Bhutan, El Salvador, or the US—countries with strategic reasons to protect national bitcoin holdings. “Some may mine even at a loss,” Demirors suggests, “because it becomes a matter of national security.”
Source: WIRED Edited by Bernie
