Bitcoin miners using AI as a bear market escape plan just got a new rival in Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has turned one of many world’s largest synthetic intelligence clusters into a industrial compute product, creating a new problem for Bitcoin miners racing to recast themselves as AI infrastructure corporations.
Anthropic said it reached a deal to make use of the complete computing energy of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, giving the Claude maker greater than 220,000 Nvidia processors and 300 megawatts of new capability inside a month.
The added capability helped Anthropic double Claude Code price limits for paid plans, take away peak-hour utilization caps for Pro and Max accounts, and sharply enhance developer request quantity for its Claude Opus fashions.
The settlement provides SpaceX a marquee AI buyer as it tries to indicate buyers that its infrastructure ambitions lengthen past rockets and satellites.
It additionally lands instantly in the market Bitcoin miners have been making an attempt to enter: the race to safe energy for knowledge facilities for AI corporations that want electrical energy quicker than the grid can ship it.
For miners, the issue is now not solely Bitcoin’s worth, community issue, or the subsequent halving. The new query is whether or not they can compete with know-how giants, neoclouds, and Musk-linked infrastructure platforms in the race to transform electrical energy into AI income.
Miners transfer towards compute
Bitcoin miners have spent the previous yr arguing that their future can be formed much less by block rewards and extra by powered websites, long-term leases, and AI compute demand.
That shift accelerated after the 2024 Bitcoin halving, which minimize the block subsidy paid to miners and tightened an already difficult margin structure.
CoinShares mentioned the fourth quarter of 2025 was probably the most tough interval for miners for the reason that halving, as Bitcoin’s price correction and near-record hashrate pushed hashprice to five-year lows.
The agency mentioned hash worth fell additional in the primary quarter to about $29 per petahash per second per day, extending strain on operators with older machines and better energy prices.
As a consequence, BTC mining economics have pushed a number of public miners toward AI and high-performance computing.
CoinShares mentioned listed miners might generate as a lot as 70% of their income from AI by the top of this yr, up from roughly 30% in the present day. The agency additionally said that public miners have introduced greater than $70 billion in combination GPU colocation and cloud service agreements with hyperscalers and AI prospects by way of 2025 and early 2026.
That transition is already seen in the sector’s company map. BTC miners like TeraWulf, Core Scientific, Cipher, and Hut 8 have more and more turn out to be data-center operators that also mine Bitcoin.
Other miners, together with IREN and Bitfarms, are using mining as a bridge into high-performance computing, whereas some operators stay extra carefully tied to Bitcoin mining and low-cost vitality methods.
The distinction has turn out to be central to investor valuations. CoinShares mentioned miners with secured HPC contracts commerce at enterprise-value-to-next-12-month gross sales multiples of 12.3 occasions, in contrast with 5.9 occasions for pure-play miners.
The result’s a sector break up between infrastructure corporations with AI exposure and mining companies whose earnings nonetheless transfer extra instantly with Bitcoin’s worth and hash worth.
Power turns into the commerce
Meanwhile, the miner pivot has gained traction as a result of AI demand has uncovered a bottleneck that mining corporations perceive higher than most: entry to large-scale electrical energy.
AI builders want chips, however chips are solely helpful when they are often put in in amenities with energy, cooling, and grid connections. That has shifted market consideration towards energized websites able to supporting dense computing hundreds.
Artemis, a blockchain evaluation agency, has argued that the AI commerce could also be extra about energy than chips, pointing to a projected roughly 50-gigawatt US data-center energy deficit by way of 2028.
The agency additionally described BTC miners such as IREN, Core Scientific, and TeraWulf as AI infrastructure corporations hiding in plain sight.
At the identical time, Artemis famous that the Bitcoin miner AI theme rose 56% over the previous month, forward of baskets tied to AI chips, knowledge facilities, energy, and different infrastructure segments.
That worth motion displays a market more and more prepared to worth miners for his or her energy portfolios fairly than just for their Bitcoin manufacturing.
Modular Capital’s research factors to the identical constraint. The agency mentioned AI workloads require sustained high-density energy at a scale that the prevailing grid interconnection course of can’t ship shortly.
It estimated that knowledge facilities, which now account for about 3% to 4% of complete US grid consumption, might attain 12% by 2028 as hyperscaler capital expenditure runs close to $650 billion this yr.
The grid queue makes the shortage extra acute. Modular mentioned large-load interconnection timelines can stretch 4 years or extra, whereas ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, has roughly 458 gigawatts of pending purposes.
In PJM, the grid area protecting Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and far of the Northeast, a new large-load interconnection is broadly stalled after obtainable provide capability fell 20% over 4 years. Large transformers can take two to a few years to acquire, and substations for hundreds above 100 megawatts can add one other 18 to 24 months.
Those delays clarify why BTC miners have become attractive candidates for AI infrastructure. Many of them had secured energy contracts earlier than the AI buildout intensified. Some have already got land, interconnections, and working expertise with industrial-scale vitality use.
However, a mining website nonetheless wants vital work earlier than it will possibly host superior AI workloads, however probably the most precious asset could also be its place in the ability queue.
Musk enters the race
SpaceX’s Colossus deal modifications the aggressive map as a result of it exhibits that the ability commerce is attracting corporations with deeper capital swimming pools and broader know-how platforms.
Neocloud operators purchase or lease giant swimming pools of GPUs and lease computing capability to AI builders. Bitcoin miners have been making an attempt to maneuver into that market by providing powered shells, colocation, and, in some instances, cloud companies.
Musk’s ecosystem can method the identical market from one other angle by constructing huge AI clusters for inside use, then leasing capability when workloads shift elsewhere.
For context, Musk reportedly mentioned SpaceX had moved its AI coaching efforts to Colossus 2 and would supply computing capability to different AI corporations making comparable efforts to favor humanity.
This remark suggests Colossus 1 grew to become obtainable as a result of SpaceX’s personal coaching work had already moved to a newer website, permitting the corporate to monetize an present asset with out abandoning its broader AI ambitions.
That is a totally different type of competitors for BTC miners. A transformed mining website might supply low-cost energy and quicker time-to-market than a new data-center mission. Colossus presents rapid scale, a frontier AI buyer, and a platform tied to Musk’s broader ambitions in AI, area, and infrastructure.
Anthropic additionally mentioned it’s in working with SpaceX on a number of gigawatts of orbital knowledge facilities, a long-range idea that may use solar energy in area and require main technical and capital commitments.
That broadens the competitive field for BTC miners as they’re now not pitching AI conversion solely in opposition to different miners. They are competing with hyperscalers, neoclouds, vitality builders, infrastructure funds, and know-how platforms that may construct or reallocate capability at huge scale.
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