Not so long ago, mining new BTC was an extremely profitable business. But the gold rush phase has gradually faded. Large industry players are now increasingly turning their attention to a more lucrative segment — AI and High Performance Computing (HPC).
AI gives miners more predictable revenue
Over the past few weeks, several companies have partially or fully announced a move away from traditional crypto mining. The reasons are clear: high costs, low margins, and extremely intense competition. All of this makes the business less attractive, especially given that mining has never been known for particularly stable or predictable income streams.
The shift toward AI and HPC is expected to bring that predictability back into corporate financial models. According to Alexandre Schmidt of CoinShares, under current economic conditions, mining generates roughly 300,000–400,000 dollars per megawatt per year. By comparison, AI and HPC contracts can generate as much as 1.4 million dollars over the same period.
At the same time, the CoinShares expert does not believe this means miners’ financial situation will improve overnight. AI infrastructure requires completely different hardware from the machines currently used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain. That means companies must invest in expensive fleet upgrades. In Schmidt’s estimate, capital expenditures per megawatt in the AI segment are five to ten times higher than in mining.
Because the capital requirements are so high, miners are increasingly being forced to sell part of their BTC reserves, abandoning strategies many of them had followed for years.
What this means for Bitcoin’s security
Inside the crypto industry, this trend is causing concern. The issue is not so much the sale of coins itself, since that has happened many times before, especially in bear markets, but rather the fear that the departure of large mining companies could weaken Bitcoin’s network security. Some critics even go so far as to claim that “AI has killed Bitcoin for good.”
However, experts do not see those fears as justified. André Dragosch of Bitwise argues that miners shifting toward AI does not pose an existential threat to Bitcoin’s security. As evidence, he points to the hashrate, one of the main indicators of network resilience. According to him, even after some miners diversified away from pure Bitcoin mining, the Bitcoin hashrate remains around 1,000 EH/s, still close to all-time highs. In practical terms, that means attacking the network remains economically irrational.
Alexandre Schmidt also believes there is no major long-term threat. He notes that Bitcoin is designed as a self-regulating system: if too many participants leave the market at the same time, economic conditions improve for those who remain and for new entrants. That, in turn, attracts fresh miners and helps restore balance.
In the future, only the most efficient miners will survive
The mining business is likely to become even more unforgiving going forward, especially after the next halving, which is expected in about two years and will cut the block reward from the current 3.125 BTC in half.
Both experts agree on one point: future participants will need extreme efficiency. And that is not just about better hardware, but above all about access to very cheap electricity. According to Schmidt, in order to remain profitable, miners in the future will need power that is almost free.
The entire logic of Bitcoin mining has always depended on production costs staying below Bitcoin’s market price. Anything else would be uneconomic. That is why miners already tend to locate their operations where electricity is cheap. In the future, unused or surplus energy sources may become decisive. In that scenario, Bitcoin could function as a highly flexible consumer of excess electricity, and for some observers that even makes the cryptocurrency a potential ally of the energy transition.
