The most valuable asset for a bitcoin miner is not the rack of ASIC equipment, but the energy contract. Public miners have collectively announced contracts in the AI and high-performance computing sector worth between $70 billion and $100 billion, transforming from proof-of-work operators into a kind of "energy rentiers" for the artificial intelligence boom.
The economics speak for themselves. An AI tenant brings in about $1.5 million per megawatt per year, while bitcoin mining yields approximately $500,000 per megawatt – a threefold premium for essentially the same thing: keeping the equipment running and cooling it. The 2024 halving has made this math even more one-sided: the block reward has been cut in half, and miners with thin margins have a strong incentive to seek tenants willing to pay top dollar for their connections to the grid.
Among the largest deals: Core Scientific signed a 12-year contract with CoreWeave for $10.2 billion, covering 590 MW of capacity. TeraWulf has accumulated over $12.8 billion in contracted revenue in the HPC segment. IREN struck a deal with Microsoft for about $9.7 billion over five years for GPU cloud services. Hut 8 secured several 15-year leases, each worth between $7 billion and $9.8 billion.
The secret weapon of miners is not technology, but paperwork. Connecting a new facility to the power grid in the U.S. can take years, while AI hyperscalers need energy urgently. Bitcoin miners already have connected sites: they have been securing power purchase agreements for years, building substations, and negotiating connection rights. This infrastructure, originally designed for round-the-clock SHA-256 computations, is almost perfectly suited for hosting AI workloads with similar power density and uptime requirements.
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