One afternoon in In June 2024, I stood outside the fence of a sprawling industrial facility a few miles from Corsica, Texas. Above the metal gate, I watched a dazzling yellow excavator dig into the earth and flatbed trucks going back and forth. A hangar-like building with a gleaming white roof stretched hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owned the plot, Riot Platforms, was working to build the world’s largest bitcoin mine.
A year and a half later, the expected two-thirds of the facility are being built repurposed to tackle artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Less of a bitcoin temple, this facility could become an artificial intelligence megafactory.
Throughout the United States, an identical pattern occurs in bitcoin mines owned by various operators. At least eight other publicly traded bitcoin mining companies in the last 18 months:Bitfarms, Scientific core, Riot, IREN, TeraWulf, CzystaSparka, Digital bit, MARA HoldingAND Extracting ciphers—announced plans to fully or partially transition to artificial intelligence.
The change reflects enormous demand among AI companies for data centers equipped to handle the energy-intensive workloads required to train their models. Ironically, as the AI arms race intensifies, enormous bitcoin mining companies – which fueled the AI boom by pumping billions of dollars into data center infrastructure – are being forced to reinvent themselves.
“Bitcoin mining has created the blueprint for the AI computing boom and the modern data center,” says Meltem Demirors, general partner at VC firm Crucible Capital, which invests in companies in the crypto, computing and energy sectors. “They found that their cost of capital is much lower if they delve into the AI narrative. They have a powered shell, they break out [mining machines]and their tenant supplies the GPUs.”
The perfect storm
To earn the right to process a batch of Bitcoin transactions and claim the associated reward, mining companies compete to solve a computational puzzle. The profitability of a mining operation depends largely on the current price of bitcoin, the amount of computation thrown at the puzzle, and the cost of powering the specialized mining equipment necessary to remain competitive.
Over the past few years, as hardware has advanced, competition on the Bitcoin network has increased grew exponentiallymeaning that winning the bitcoin prize required more and more calculations. Meanwhile, in 2024, the size of this reward halved – as it happens approximately every four years – to 3,125 bitcoin. Against this background, recent Bitcoin price drop to around $85,000 – a 30 percent decline from the 2025 peak – has created a veritable firestorm that threatens the viability of all but the most profitable mines.
“The economics are terrible today,” says Charles Chong, vice president of strategy at cryptocurrency consultancy BlockSpaceForce and former chief strategy officer at bitcoin mining company Foundry. “If I buy a Bitcoin mining machine today, I don’t know if I can get my money back.”