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@ daprince
2025-06-05 02:59:12Bitcoin Miners Pivot to Power AI Boom, Offering a Lifeline to America’s Data-Center Crunch
A fresh Morgan Stanley analysis warns that U.S. data-center demand will balloon to ≈65 GW between 2025 and 2028—about 45 GW more than the grid can currently supply. One solution the bank singles out: repurposing the oversized, transformer-fed campuses originally built for Bitcoin mining. (investopedia.com)
Several public miners are already moving. Riot Platforms has begun buying extra land near its Corsicana, TX complex and hired a veteran data-center executive to head a “high-performance compute” division aimed squarely at AI customers. (riotplatforms.com, coindesk.com) Bitfarms, meanwhile, is marketing North-American sites to hyperscalers after hiring consultants to evaluate GPU-ready retrofits. (reuters.com)
Industry analysts say the pivot is existential. April 2024’s fourth halving chopped block rewards to 3.125 BTC, shrinking miner revenue just as network difficulty hit record highs. By leasing idle megawatts—or fully converting halls—operators lock in dollar-denominated cash-flows while retaining the option to resume mining if margins rebound.
“Miners spent the last cycle amassing land, switchgear and transformers. AI is about to pay them for it.” —Greg Miller, Citizens JMP (research note quoted in multiple sector briefings)
Why it matters
- Grid relief: Every gigawatt shifted from speculative hashing to AI compute eases ERCOT’s peak-load stress and shortens transmission-upgrade timelines. (datacenterdynamics.com)
- Cap-ex savings for cloud firms: Retrofitting a mining hall is months faster—and currently 30-40 % cheaper—than green-field construction, analysts estimate. (govtech.com)
- Dual-revenue model: Miners keep upside to future BTC price spikes while monetizing power capacity today.
The roadblocks
- Cooling retrofits: Air-cooled ASIC barns must be re-engineered for liquid-cooled GPU clusters, at up to \$3 M per MW in conversion costs. (driehaus.com)
- Policy risk in Texas: Lawmakers are weighing caps on industrial load-flex credits after recent grid-stress events, which could dent miners’ ancillary revenue. (dallasnews.com)
Bottom line: Once-beleaguered Bitcoin mines may become critical real estate for the surging AI sector—turning yesterday’s crypto boomtowns into tomorrow’s compute hubs while giving miners a much-needed new income stream.