AI’s power crunch turns Bitcoin miners’ grid access into an asset

Bitcoin miners have the power sites AI companies need, but turning old mining campuses into real data center revenue is no easy pivot.

By the end of 2025, the power capacity tied to artificial intelligence data centers worldwide had reached about 29.6 gigawatts (GW), enough to run all of New York state at peak demand, according to Stanford University’s annual report on the AI industry. 

The report, released in April, suggests that compute itself is abundant and getting cheaper. Permitted, grid-connected, ready-to-draw electricity is in high demand, but the sources to power it are much harder to come by. One industry has spent the past decade quietly building exactly that infrastructure for a different reason: Bitcoin mining.

AI data center power capacity reached about 29.6 GW by the end of 2025, comparable to New York state at peak demand. Source: Stanford University

The economics of chips are moving in the opposite direction. Stanford said the cost of GPU computation has dropped more than 99% since 2006, while leading chips now perform far more work per watt than they did a decade ago. But efficiency gains have not reduced total demand. They are instead poured back into larger models rather than banked as savings, keeping the pressure on the power grid.

The cost of GPU computation has fallen more than 99% since 2006, even as total power draw climbed. Source: Stanford University

Stanford estimates that the most demanding training runs, including for systems such as Llama 4 Behemoth, have pulled upward of 100 megawatts (MW), comparable to a small power plant. Capacity dedicated to AI has risen some 200-fold in three years, from under a gigawatt in 2022, and data center electricity use is projected to keep rising through 2030.

The squeeze is geographic as much as numerical. The United States hosts 5,427 data centers, more than 10 times any other country, according to Stanford.

Chips can be ordered and delivered in months, but energizing a site, with its substation, interconnection approval and cooling, takes years.

Counted across full systems rather than the accelerators alone, AI’s cumulative power demand through 2024 reached an estimated 9.4 GW, close to the national electricity use of Switzerland or Austria and about half the estimated draw of Bitcoin mining.

Estimated all-in AI power demand (through 2024) sits near half of Bitcoin mining's. Source: de Vries-Gao, Stanford University

But Bitcoin miners cannot just hand their machines to an AI lab. Mining ASICs (the chips that solve Bitcoin calculations) do one narrow job and are useless for training or inference. What does transfer is everything around the chips, such as the energized sites, power contracts, grid hookups and the shells to cool dense racks.