Anthropic has announced a partnership with Google and Broadcom for “multiple gigawatts” of next-generation TPU computing capacity expected to come online starting in 2027, a commitment the company called its most significant to date as revenue growth accelerated to an annual run rate of $30 billion from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
The scale of demand for AI computing now competes directly with bitcoin mining for the same scarce resources: grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure and cheap electricity.
A Cambridge tracker estimates that bitcoin mining consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power globally, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions.
Anthropic securing multiple gigawatts from a single deal, on top of existing capacity in AWS Trainium, Google TPU and Nvidia GPU, shows how quickly AI is becoming a peer-level competitor for the same energy infrastructure miners depend on.
And Anthropic is a company. OpenAI, which raised $122 billion last week and described computing as a “strategic moat,” is being built across an even broader infrastructure portfolio spanning five cloud providers and four chip platforms.
The added development of AI computing now represents one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, and comes at the same time that bitcoin miners are deciding whether to mine bitcoins or rent their infrastructure to AI companies.
That decision is increasingly going in one direction. Core Scientific converted a significant portion of its mining capacity to AI hosting through a deal with CoreWeave. Iris Energy and Hut 8 have expanded their AI and high-performance computing revenues. Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings and Genius Group revealed that they sold more than 19,000 BTC from their treasuries last week, a sign that the mining economy alone is not sustaining operations at current prices and difficulty levels.
A bitcoin miner running one gigawatt of capacity earns income that fluctuates with the price of bitcoin and the difficulty of the network. The same gigawatt leased to an AI company gets a contracted rate with predictable cash flows.
With bitcoin priced at $69,000, struggling at all-time highs, and energy costs rising along with all the other industrial consumers competing for the same grid capacity, AI rental often pays better.
The revenue figures behind the expansion tell their own story. Anthropic said the number of business customers spending more than $1 million a year at Claude has doubled from 500 to more than 1,000 in less than two months.
However, none of this means that bitcoin mining is dying. The network hashrate continues to reach record levels above 1 zetahash per second.
But the miners that survive the current cycle may look less like energy companies producing bitcoins and more like infrastructure companies mining bitcoins while renting their real asset, cheap energy at scale, to an artificial intelligence industry that can’t build data centers fast enough.
