Bitcoin Miners Pivot to AI Data Centers for Higher Profits

Core Scientific’s $3.5 billion deal to host AI data centers marks a major shift in the bitcoin mining industry. Once reliant on specialized ASIC machines to mint digital assets, miners like Core, Hut 8, and TeraWulf are now repurposing facilities to power GPU clusters that fuel artificial intelligence workloads. This pivot is driven by rising energy costs, surging hashrates, and shrinking bitcoin mining margins.

During the 2021 bull run, miners enjoyed margins as high as 90%. But with today’s higher difficulty levels, energy prices, and reduced block rewards, profitability has sharply declined. To survive, miners leaned into what they do best—securing cheap, large-scale power and managing high-density cooling. These very strengths are now being leveraged by AI firms like OpenAI and Google, which require energy-intensive, power-dense environments to run advanced GPUs such as Nvidia’s H100 series.

Instead of building costly new facilities, AI companies are retrofitting mining infrastructure. Cooling systems, energy contracts, and scalable power setups once designed for bitcoin are now repurposed for AI compute. This transformation can be completed in under a year—far faster than traditional data center builds. Crusoe Energy and other players have even sold off mining assets to focus fully on AI infrastructure.

Although AI requires higher upfront investment—ranging from advanced cooling to costly GPUs—the revenue potential is far greater. AI operations can generate up to 25 times more revenue per kilowatt-hour than bitcoin mining, making the shift economically attractive despite supply chain hurdles.

While the global crypto mining market is projected to hit $3.3 billion by 2030, AI infrastructure spending is forecast to soar past $435 billion by 2032. For miners, this evolution signals a long-term strategy: stable AI hosting contracts replacing crypto’s volatile boom-and-bust cycle, transforming yesterday’s bitcoin farms into tomorrow’s AI empires.