US investment management firm VanEck believes that Bitcoin miners could earn an extra $13.9 billion a year through AI partnerships.
The firm said that publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies could make billions by using a fifth of their power for AI and HPC deals by 2027.
Such a move could hedge against the volatility of cryptocurrencies, which can spike or crash with little predictability. It also comes as traditional data centers have struggled to build fast enough, and find enough power, to keep up with AI demand.
This has led to a number of cryptominers pivoting to AI, most notably CoreWeave which fully moved to supporting AI/HPC workloads. It then signed a 12-year contract with miner Core Scientific, which is expected to be worth $3.5 billion.
Crusoe Energy earlier this summer announced plans to build and lease a facility to Oracle, which will then lease it to Microsoft - to be used by OpenAI.
Hive Digital Technologies, Northern Data, Applied, Iris Energy, and others are also expanding HPC operations alongside their crypto businesses. This month, Mawson Infrastructure signed its first non-crypto deal.
