When Core Scientific signed a $ 3.5 billion agreement to organize artificial intelligence (AI) Data centers earlier this year, I was not chasing the next cryptographic token, it pursued a more stable payment check. Once known for its vast fleets of Bitcoin mining platforms, the company is now part of a growing trend: converting energy intensive mining operations into high -performance AI facilities.
Bitcoin Miners as Core, Hut 8 (CABIN) and Terawulf (Wulf) They are exchanging ASIC machines, the dedicated Bitcoin mining computer, for GPU groups, driven by the attractiveness of AI explosive growth and the hard economy of cryptographic mining.
Power game
It is no secret that Bitcoin Mining requires a lot of energy, which is the highest cost of coining a new digital asset.
In the 2021 Toro race, when the hashrate and the difficulty of the Bitcoin network were low, the miners kissed like bandits with margins up to 90%. Then came the brutal cryptographic winter and the middle of the middle, which cut the mining reward in half. In 2025, with the growing hashrate and energy prices, miners are now struggling to survive with thin razors.
However, the need for power, the largest entry cost, became a blessing disguised as these miners, who needed a different strategy to diversify their sources of income.
Due to the growing competence for mining, the miners continued to acquire more machines to stay afloat, and with it came the need for more electricity megawatts at a cheaper price. The miners invested strongly in obtaining these low -cost energy sources, such as hydroelectric or stranded natural gas sites, and developed experience in the management of high density cooling and electricity systems, perfected skills during the rise of cryptographic cryptographic in the early 2020s.
This is what captured the attention of AI companies and cloud computing. Although Bitcoin is based on specialized ASIC, AI Prospera in versatile GPUs such as the NVIDIA H100 series, which require similar high power environments but for parallel processing tasks in automatic learning. Instead of building data centers from scratch, taking care of the mining infrastructure, which already has ready energy, became a faster way to cultivate an increasing appetite due to the infrastructure related to AI.
Essentially, these miners are not just pivotos, they are modifying.
Cooling systems, low -cost energy contracts and dense infrastructure in energy that they built during the cryptographic boom now have a new purpose: feeding the models of the AI of companies such as Openai and Google.
Signatures such as Crusoe Energy sold mining assets to focus only on AI, deploying GPU groups in remote energy locations that reflect the decentralized spirit of cryptography but now combine hyperscalers from centralized.
Terraft AI
Bitcoin Mining has “terrafformed” effectively the land for the calculation of AI through the construction of a scalable and efficient infrastructure that desperately needs.
Like Nicholas Gregory, director of the Fraont Prosperity Board, he said: “It can be argued that Bitcoin paved the way for digital dollar payments as can be seen with USDT/Tether. It also looks like Bitcoin’s data centers for Bitcoin for AI/GPU Compute.”
This pre -existing “terraft” allows miners to modernize the facilities quickly, often in less than a year, compared to the deadlines of several years for the compilations of traditional data centers. Signatures such as Crusoe Energy sold mining assets to focus only on AI, deploying GPU groups in remote energy locations that reflect the decentralized spirit of cryptography but now combine hyperscalers from centralized.
Greater returns
In practice, it means that miners can turn an installation in less than a year, much faster than the timeline of several years of a new data center.
But AI is not a cheap update.
Bitcoin mining configurations are relatively modest, with costs ranging from $ 300,000 to $ 800,000 per Megavatio (MW) Excluding ASIC, allowing rapid scalability in response to market cycles. Meanwhile, AI infrastructure requires a significantly greater capex due to the need for advanced fluid cooling, redundant energy systems and GPU themselves, which can cost tens of thousands per unit and face shortage of global supply. Despite the most pronounced initial costs, AI offers the miners up to 25 times more income per kilowatt-hora than Bitcoin mining, which makes the useless economically convincing in the middle of the growing prices of energy and the decrease in cryptographic profitability.
A niche industry worth billions
As IA continues to tension and cryptographic profits fit, Bitcoin mining could become a niche game, one reserved for regions rich in energy or highly efficient players, especially because the next one in 2028 could make many operations not profitable without progress in efficiency or energy costs.
While projections show that the global cryptographic mining market grows to $ 3.3 billion by 2030, with a modest cag of 6.9%, billions would be eclipsed by AI’s exponential expansion. According to KBV Research, it is projected that the global AI market in the mining market will reach $ 435.94 billion by 2032, expanding to a compound annual growth rate (Cag) of 40.6%.
Since investors already see signs of dollar in this change, the largest trend suggests that the future is a hybrid or complete conversion to AI, where stable contracts with hyperscalers promise longevity on cryptography boom cycles.
This evolution not only reuses inactive assets, but also underlines how yesterday’s cryptographic borders are forging the empires of tomorrow.
