Bitcoin miners are quietly becoming the backbone of the AI boom

The infrastructure that powered proof-of-work is now pivoting to power artificial intelligence, and the economics aren't even close.

Here’s a number that should reframe how you think about Bitcoin mining: AI data centers can generate roughly $25 per kilowatt-hour in revenue. Bitcoin mining pulls in about $1. That’s a 25x revenue gap that explains why some of the biggest names in crypto mining are sprinting toward artificial intelligence workloads.

Listed Bitcoin miners are now collectively pursuing more than $70 billion in AI data center contracts, according to a CoinShares report. The same report projects that AI-related revenue could balloon from around 30% of total miner revenue to as much as 70% by the end of 2026.

Bitcoin miners spent years doing the hard, unglamorous work of securing exactly what AI data centers need: massive power contracts, large tracts of land, cooling infrastructure, and the regulatory approvals to operate energy-intensive facilities. Getting all of those in place can take years. Miners already have them.

Texas offers perhaps the clearest illustration of this dynamic. Large-load power requests in the state surged to 226 GW in 2025, and a staggering 73% of that demand is attributed to AI.

Core Scientific has been one of the most aggressive movers. The company locked in a 12-year agreement with CoreWeave for approximately 200 MW of AI hosting capacity, with options for further expansion.

IREN, another miner making the transition, generated $17.3 million in AI cloud revenue during Q4 2025 alone. The company now operates more than 10,900 NVIDIA GPUs. And TeraWulf has gone even bigger, reporting $12.8 billion in contracted high-performance computing revenue.

At $25 per kWh versus $1 per kWh, the financial incentive to redirect capacity toward AI workloads is overwhelming. The CoinShares projection of AI revenue reaching 70% of total miner income by late 2026 suggests this isn’t a temporary flirtation. It’s a structural transformation.

Bitcoin mining doesn’t disappear in this scenario. It becomes the flexible load, the thing you do when AI demand dips or when energy prices make mining profitable on the margin. Miners can toggle between workloads depending on market conditions, giving them an operational flexibility that pure-play AI data center operators simply don’t have.

Core Scientific, IREN, and TeraWulf are no longer just bets on Bitcoin staying above a certain price. They’re bets on the insatiable demand for AI compute power. That diversification reduces the binary risk that made mining stocks notoriously volatile.