Elon Musk’s SpaceX has turned one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence clusters into a commercial computing product, creating new challenges for Bitcoin miners racing to transform themselves into AI infrastructure companies.
Anthropic announced that it has reached an agreement to maximize the computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, delivering more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and 300 megawatts of new capacity to Claude within a month.
The added capacity helped remove double Claude code rate limits on Anthropic’s paid plans, peak usage caps on Pro and Max accounts, and significantly increased developer request volume for Claude Opus models.
The deal makes SpaceX a strong AI customer as it seeks to show investors that its infrastructure ambitions extend beyond rockets and satellites.
It also plays directly into the market Bitcoin miners are trying to enter: the race to secure power for the data centers of AI companies that need power faster than the grid can provide it.
For miners, the issue is no longer just the price of Bitcoin, network difficulty, or the next halving. The new question is whether it can compete with tech giants, NeoCloud and Musk’s infrastructure platforms in the race to convert electricity into AI revenue.
Miners move to computing
Bitcoin miners have been arguing for the past year that their future will be shaped by powered sites, long-term leases, and AI computing demands, not block rewards.
This change accelerated after Bitcoin’s halving in 2024, when block subsidies paid to miners were reduced and an already difficult margin structure was tightened.
CoinShares said the fourth quarter of 2025 was the most difficult period for miners since the halving, with Bitcoin’s price correction and near-record hash rate pushing the hash price to a five-year low.
The company said hash prices fell further in the first quarter to around $29 per petahash per day, increasing pressure on operators with older machines and higher power costs.
As a result, the economics of BTC mining have pushed some public miners towards AI and high-performance computing.
CoinShares said listed miners could generate up to 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of this year, up from around 30% currently. The company also said the public miner announced more than $70 billion in total GPU colocation and cloud services contracts with hyperscalers and AI customers through 2025 and early 2026.
That shift is already visible on the industry’s corporate map. BTC miners such as TeraWulf, Core Scientific, Cipher, and Hut 8 are becoming data center operators that still mine Bitcoin.
While other miners such as IREN and Bitfarms are using mining as a bridge to high-performance computing, some operators still maintain close ties to Bitcoin mining and low-cost energy strategies.
This difference is central to investors’ evaluations. According to CoinShares, miners with secure HPC contracts have a multiple of 12.3x between enterprise value and next 12-month revenue, compared to 5.9x for pure miners.
The result will be a sector split between infrastructure companies with exposure to AI and mining companies whose profits will still directly impact the price of Bitcoin and the hash price.
power becomes a trade
Meanwhile, the miner pivot is gaining momentum as AI demands reveal the bottleneck mining companies best understand: access to large-scale power.
AI developers need chips, but chips are only useful if they can be installed in facilities with power, cooling, and grid connectivity. This has shifted the market’s attention to revitalized sites that can support high-density computing loads.
Blockchain analytics firm Artemis argues that the AI trade may be more about electricity than chips, noting that by 2028, the US data center power deficit is expected to be around 50 gigawatts.
The company also described BTC miners such as IREN, Core Scientific, and TeraWulf as AI infrastructure companies hiding in plain sight.
At the same time, Artemis noted that the Bitcoin miner AI theme has risen 56% in the last month, outperforming a basket related to AI chips, data centers, power and other infrastructure sectors.
This price move reflects that the market is increasingly valuing miners not only for their Bitcoin production but also for their power portfolios.
Modular Capital’s research points to the same limitations. The company said AI workloads require sustained, high-density power at a scale that existing grid interconnection processes cannot quickly provide.
With hyperscaler capital spending reaching nearly $650 billion this year, data centers currently account for about 3% to 4% of total U.S. power grid consumption, but estimates could reach 12% by 2028.
Queues on the grid make the shortage even more acute. Modular said the schedule for large-load interconnections could span more than four years, while about 458 gigawatts of applications are pending with Texas transmission operator ERCOT.
PJM, a grid region covering Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and much of the Northeast, has seen widespread outages of new heavy-load interconnections as available capacity has declined by 20% in four years. Procuring large transformers can take two to three years, and an additional 18 to 24 months for substations with loads greater than 100 megawatts.
These delays explain why BTC miners have become attractive candidates for AI infrastructure. Many had secured power contracts before the AI ramp-up. Some companies already have operational experience with land, interconnection, and industrial-scale energy use.
However, there is still considerable work to be done before a mining site can host advanced AI workloads, but its most valuable asset may be its place in the power queue.
Musk joins the race
SpaceX’s deal with Colossus will change the competitive map as it shows power trading is attracting companies with deeper capital pools and broader technology platforms.
Neocloud operators purchase or lease large pools of GPUs and rent computing power to AI developers. Bitcoin miners are trying to tap into that market by offering powered shells, colocation, and in some cases cloud services.
Musk’s ecosystem can approach the same market from a different angle by building large AI clusters for internal use and leasing capacity as workloads move elsewhere.
Musk reportedly said that SpaceX will move its AI training efforts to Colossus 2 and provide computing power to other AI companies doing similar efforts for humanity.
The comment suggests that Colossus 1 is being made available because SpaceX’s own training efforts have already been moved to the new site, allowing the company to monetize existing assets without abandoning its broader AI ambitions.
This is a different kind of competition for BTC miners. Converted mining sites may offer cheaper power and faster time to market than new data center projects. Colossus offers instant scale, frontier AI customers, and a platform tied to Musk’s broader ambitions in AI, space, and infrastructure.
Anthropic also said it is interested in working with SpaceX on a multi-gigawatt orbital data center, a long-range concept that uses solar power in space and requires large technical and capital commitments.
This widens the playing field as BTC miners no longer sell AI conversions only to other miners. They compete with hyperscalers, neoclouds, energy developers, infrastructure funds, and technology platforms that can build or reallocate capacity at massive scale.
(Tag translation) Bitcoin
