Anthropic has announced a partnership with Google and Broadcom for “several gigawatts” of next-generation TPU computing capacity expected to come online from 2027, a commitment the company called its most significant to date, as revenue growth accelerated to an annual operating rate of $30 billion from $9 billion in late 2025.
The scale of AI computing demand now directly competes with bitcoin mining for the same scarce resources – grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure and cheap electricity.
A Cambridge tracker estimates that bitcoin mining draws about 13 to 25 gigawatts of continuous power globally, depending on hardware efficiency assumptions.
Anthropic securing several gigawatts from a single deal, on top of existing capacity across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, shows how quickly AI is becoming a peer-to-peer competitor for the same energy infrastructure that miners depend on.
And Anthropic is one company. OpenAI, which raised $122 billion last week and described compute as a “strategic moat,” is building on an even broader infrastructure portfolio that spans five cloud providers and four chip platforms.
The overall AI computing expansion now represents one of the largest sources of new electricity demand in the US, arriving at the same moment bitcoin miners are deciding whether to mine bitcoin or lease their infrastructure to AI companies.
That decision increasingly goes in one direction. Core Scientific converted a significant portion of its mining capacity to AI hosting through a deal with CoreWeave. Iris Energy and Hut 8 have expanded their AI and high-performance computing revenue. Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings and Genius Group disclosed selling more than 19,000 BTC from their coffers last week, a sign that mining economics alone are not sustaining operations at current prices and difficulty levels.
A bitcoin miner running a gigawatt of capacity earns revenue that fluctuates with bitcoin’s price and network problems. The same gigawatt leased to an AI company earns a contracted rate with predictable cash flows.
With $69,000 bitcoin difficulty at an all-time high and energy costs rising along with all other industrial consumers competing for the same network capacity, AI often pays the rent better.
The turnover figures behind the expansion tell their own story. Anthropic said the number of business customers spending more than $1 million annually on Claude has doubled from 500 to over 1,000 in less than two months.
However, none of this means that bitcoin mining is dying. The network’s hashrate continues to hit record levels above 1 zetahash per second.
But the miners that survive the current cycle may look less like energy companies that produce bitcoin and more like infrastructure companies that happen to mine bitcoin on the side while leasing their real asset, cheap power at scale, to an AI industry that can’t build data centers fast enough.
