Bitcoin miners using AI as a bear market escape plan have a new competitor in Elon Musk.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has turned one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence clusters into commercial computing products, creating a new challenge for Bitcoin miners vying to become an AI infrastructure company.
Anthropic said it has agreed to use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, giving the Claude manufacturer more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and 300 MW of new capacity within a month.
The added capacity helped double Claude Code rate limits on Anthropic’s paid plans, eliminated peak hour usage limits for Pro and Max accounts, and significantly increased developer request volume for the Claude Opus model.
The deal makes SpaceX a major AI customer as it seeks to show investors that its infrastructure ambitions extend beyond rockets and satellites.
This also cuts directly into the market Bitcoin miners were trying to enter: the race to secure power in data centers for AI companies that need electricity faster than the grid can deliver it.
For miners, the issue is no longer just Bitcoin’s price, network difficulty, or the next halving. The new question is whether it can compete with tech giants, NeoCloud and the Musk Connected Infrastructure Platform in the race to turn electricity into AI revenue.
Miners move to computing
Bitcoin miners have been arguing for the past year that their future will be determined more by advanced sites, long-term leases and AI computing demands than by block rewards.
These changes accelerated following the Bitcoin halving in 2024, which cut block subsidies paid to miners and tightened already difficult margin structures.
CoinShares said the fourth quarter of 2025 was the most difficult period for miners since the halving, as Bitcoin’s price correction and record hashrate sent hash prices to a five-year low.
The company said hashish prices fell further in the first quarter to about $29 per petahash per day, putting pressure on operators with older machines and higher power costs.
As a result, BTC mining economics has pushed several public miners into AI and high-performance computing.
CoinShares said listed miners could generate up to 70% of their revenue through AI by the end of this year. This is an increase from the current figure of around 30%. The company also said that public miners have announced GPU co-location and cloud services deals totaling more than $70 billion with hyperscalers and AI customers from 2025 to early 2026.
This transition can already be seen on the corporate map of the sector. BTC miners such as TeraWulf, Core Scientific, Cipher, and Hut 8 have increasingly become data center operators that mine Bitcoin.
Other miners, including IREN and Bitfarms, are using mining as a bridge to high-performance computing, while some operators are more tightly tied to Bitcoin mining and low-cost energy strategies.
This distinction has become central to investor evaluations. According to CoinShares, miners that secure HPC contracts trade at 12.3x their enterprise value to next 12 months’ revenue, compared to 5.9x for pure miners.
The result is a sector split between infrastructure companies with exposure to AI and mining companies whose revenues are still more directly influenced by the price of Bitcoin and hash prices.
power is traded
Meanwhile, the miner focus has gained momentum as AI demand has exposed a bottleneck that mining companies understand better than most: access to large-scale power.
AI developers need chips, but they are only useful if they can be installed in facilities with power, cooling, and grid connectivity. This has shifted market attention to active sites that can support dense computing loads.
Blockchain analytics firm Artemis predicts a power shortage in U.S. data centers of about 50 gigawatts by 2028, arguing that AI trading may be more about power than chips.
The company also described BTC miners such as IREN, Core Scientific, and TeraWulf as low-profile AI infrastructure companies.
At the same time, Artemis pointed out that the Bitcoin mining AI theme is up 56% over the past month, ahead of baskets related to AI chips, data centers, power and other infrastructure sectors.
This price action reflects a market increasingly valuing miners not only for Bitcoin production but also for their power portfolio.
Modular Capital’s research points to the same limitations. The company said AI workloads require sustained, high-density power at a scale that traditional grid interconnection processes cannot quickly provide.
Data centers, which currently account for about 3-4% of total U.S. grid consumption, are estimated to reach 12% by 2028, with hyperscaler capital spending reaching nearly $650 billion this year.
Grid queues make sparsity even more severe. Modular said the large-load interconnection schedule could stretch four years or more, and Texas grid operator ERCOT has about 458 gigawatts of pending applications.
PJM, a grid region encompassing Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and much of the Northeast, has seen a general moratorium on new high-capacity interconnections after a 20% decline in available supply capacity over four years. Procuring a large transformer can take two to three years, and substations for loads over 100 megawatts can add another 18 to 24 months.
These delays explain why BTC miners are attractive candidates for AI infrastructure. Many of them signed power contracts before AI deployments were ramped up. Some already have land, interconnection and operational experience for industrial-scale energy use.
However, while mine sites still require significant work to host advanced AI workloads, their most valuable asset may be their position in the power queue.
Musk joins the race
SpaceX’s Colossus deal changes the competitive map because it shows that power trading is attracting companies with deeper capital pools and broader technology platforms.
Neocloud operators purchase or lease large pools of GPUs and lease computing capacity to AI developers. Bitcoin miners have been trying to enter that market by offering Powered Shell, colocation and, in some cases, cloud services.
Musk’s ecosystem can approach the same market from a different angle by building large AI clusters for internal use and then leasing capacity as workloads move elsewhere.
For context, Musk said SpaceX has moved its AI training efforts to Colossus 2 and will provide computing capacity to other AI companies working on similar efforts for humanity.
The comments suggest that Colossus 1 was made available because SpaceX’s own training operations had already been moved to the new site, allowing the company to monetize its existing assets without giving up its broader AI ambitions.
This is a different kind of competition for BTC miners. Converted mine sites can provide cheaper power and faster time-to-market than new data center projects. Colossus offers immediate scale, leading AI customers, and a platform connected to Musk’s broader ambitions for AI, space, and infrastructure.
Anthropic also said it was interested in using solar power in space and working with SpaceX on a multi-gigawatt orbital data center, a long-range concept that would require significant technology and capital investments.
This widens the playing field for BTC miners, as AI conversions are no longer only offered to other miners. They are competing with hyperscalers, neoclouds, energy developers, infrastructure funds and technology platforms that can build or reallocate capacity at massive scale.
