Although the price of Bitcoin (BTC) continues to be under selling pressure, BTC miners are having a boom period while tapping into new opportunities in the recently booming artificial intelligence (AI) space. A large number of miners have put their mining rigs for use in AI, amid a solid demand.
As energy costs rise and halving reduces block rewards, Bitcoin miners are redefining their business models. Rather than focusing solely on minting new coins, many are now leasing their high-performance hardware to train large language models, run AI inference workloads, and host cloud computing services. This doesn’t seem to be the end of mining, but rather marks the beginning of a new kind of mining boom.
Bitcoin Miner’s Pivot to AI Comes As Halving Rewards Drop
Bitcoin’s April 2024 halving slashed mining rewards in half, intensifying pressure on an industry already burdened by soaring electricity costs. The average hashprice i.e. the daily revenue earned per terahash, has plunged from $0.12 in early 2024 to below $0.05 by mid-2025, leaving many miners struggling to remain profitable. With electricity accounting for up to 90% of operating costs and price volatility eroding margins, miners have been forced to seek new, more stable revenue streams.
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has created a massive demand for computing power, and Bitcoin miners are uniquely positioned to meet it. Tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI face long timelines to build new data centers. Miners are at an advantage here as they already control large-scale energy contracts, cooling systems, and industrial hardware that can be repurposed for AI training and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
According to VanEck analysts, Bitcoin miners could generate as much as $38 billion in annual revenue by redirecting part of their infrastructure toward AI and HPC operations, a return up to 25 times higher per megawatt than traditional Bitcoin mining. However, the transition comes with heightened financial risk. Since late 2024, public mining companies have raised over $4.6 billion in debt and convertible instruments to fund these pivots, increasing exposure if AI-focused strategies fail to deliver.