Bitcoin miners ditch crypto for the shinier AI gold rush
Bitcoin mining used to mean warehouses of computers chasing crypto rewards, but with Bitcoin down from its $124k peak, miners are pivoting hard to AI. Riot Platforms just signed a $9bn, 20 year compute deal with Anthropic, and firms like TerraWulf, Core Scientific and Applied Digital are rebranding entirely around AI infrastructure. Their edge: years of experience finding cheap power and running massive data centers, exactly what the AI boom needs. The switch is costly and hard to reverse, but the money says it's worth it.
Turns out the real crypto endgame was just becoming a data center landlord for Anthropic.