Anthropic has announced a partnership with Google and Broadcom for “multi-gigawatts” of next-generation TPU computing power scheduled to come online starting in 2027. The company calls it its most significant initiative to date as revenue growth accelerates from $9 billion to $30 billion a year by the end of 2025.
The scale of AI computing demand is now in direct competition with Bitcoin mining for the same scarce resources (grid connectivity, land use permits, cooling infrastructure, cheap electricity).
The Cambridge tracker estimates that Bitcoin mining consumes approximately 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power worldwide, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions.
Artificially securing multiple gigawatts in a single transaction, on top of existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, shows that AI is becoming a peer-level competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners rely on.
And Anthropic is one company. OpenAI, which raised $122 billion last week and described computing as a “strategic moat,” is building an even broader infrastructure portfolio across five cloud providers and four chip platforms.
The ramp-up of AI computing is now one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the United States, and it comes at the same moment that Bitcoin miners are deciding whether to mine Bitcoin or lease their infrastructure to AI companies.
The decisions are becoming increasingly unilateral. Core Scientific has converted a significant portion of its mining capacity to AI hosting through an agreement with CoreWeave. Iris Energy and Hut 8 grew AI and high-performance computing revenue. Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, and Genius Group revealed last week that they had sold over 19,000 BTC from their treasury, demonstrating that mining economics alone cannot sustain operations at current prices and difficulty levels.
Bitcoin miners running gigawatts of capacity have income that fluctuates depending on the price of Bitcoin and the difficulty of the network. If you rent the same gigawatts to an AI company, you get a contract fee with predictable cash flows.
With the price of Bitcoin at $69,000, struggling to break new all-time highs, and energy costs rising alongside other industrial consumers competing for the same grid capacity, AI rentals are often better off.
The revenue numbers behind the expansion tell their own story. Anthropic says the number of enterprise customers spending more than $1 million annually with Claude has doubled from 500 to more than 1,000 in less than two months.
However, this does not mean that Bitcoin mining will disappear. The network’s hashrate continues to reach record levels of over 1 zetahash per second.
But the miners that survive the current cycle may look less like energy companies producing Bitcoin and more like infrastructure companies that happen to be mining Bitcoin on the side while lending their real asset, big, cheap electricity, to an AI industry that can’t build data centers fast enough.
