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One afternoon in… In June 2024, I stood in front of the fence of a sprawling industrial facility a few miles outside of Corsicana, Texas. Over a metal gate, I watched a bright yellow excavator scratch the dirt and flatbed trucks drive back and forth. There was a barn-like structure with a bright white roof extending hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owns the plot, Riot Platforms, has been busy building the game The largest Bitcoin mine in the world.
After a year and a half, it is expected that two-thirds of the facility will be built I reuse it To accommodate AI and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Far from being a Bitcoin temple, the facility is poised to become a massive artificial intelligence factory.
Across the United States, a similar pattern is occurring at Bitcoin mining facilities owned by a variety of operators. In the past 18 months, at least eight other publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies —PetFarms, Basic scientific, Riot control, Erin, Terawolf, Clean Spark, Bit Digital, Mara Holdingand Crypto mining– Announced plans to partially or completely switch to artificial intelligence.
This change reflects the growing 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, large-scale Bitcoin mining companies — which have contributed to the AI boom by pouring billions of dollars into data center infrastructure — are being forced to reinvent themselves.
“Bitcoin mining has created the blueprint for the modern AI computing and data center boom,” says Meltem Demirors, general partner at Crucible Capital, which invests in companies in the cryptocurrency, computing and energy sectors. “They find that their cost of capital is much lower if they go into the AI narrative. They have a powered chassis, they rip out (the mining machines), and the tenant brings in the GPUs.”
Perfect storm
To win the right to process a batch of Bitcoin transactions and claim the associated reward, mining companies compete to solve an algorithmic puzzle. The profitability of a mining operation depends largely on the ongoing price of Bitcoin, the amount of computing thrown into the puzzle, and the cost of running the specialized mining hardware needed to remain competitive.
In the past few years, with advances in hardware, the amount of competition on the Bitcoin network has increased It increased at an exponential rateWhich means that winning a Bitcoin reward requires more calculations. Meanwhile, in 2024, the size of this bonus was reduced by half.It happens approximately every four years– To 3.125 Bitcoin. Against this last background Bitcoin price drop to about $85,000 — a 30 percent decline from its peak in 2025 — has created a perfect storm that threatens the profitability of all but the most cost-effective mines.
“The economy is very bad today,” says Charles Chung, vice president of strategy at cryptocurrency consulting firm BlockSpaceForce and former director of strategy at bitcoin mining firm Foundry. “If I buy a Bitcoin mining machine today, I don’t know if I can get a refund.”