Bitcoin Miners Are Earning More from AI Than Mining: Here’s How

Why Bitcoiners turned to AI

The 2024 Bitcoin halving reduced block rewards to 3.125 BTC, cutting miners’ income in half. This change, combined with higher electricity costs, expensive equipment maintenance and increased competition, made traditional mining less profitable. Many mining companies struggled to maintain their profit margins and began exploring other revenue sources.

Although Bitcoin mining relies on devices called ASICs, mining companies have access to energy-dense data centers and power infrastructure. As demand for AI compute skyrockets, many miners are repurposing or upgrading their facilities with GPUs to support AI training and inference workloads. 

However, artificial intelligence demands immense computing power, especially for training large language models, powering autonomous systems and running enterprise AI tools. 

As tech companies race to secure high-performance infrastructure, Bitcoin mining firms are stepping in. Leveraging their existing energy-intensive data centers and upgrading with GPUs, many miners have begun offering AI cloud services or renting out spare capacity. This diversification allows them to generate steady, non-crypto income streams, reducing reliance on volatile Bitcoin (BTC) revenues.

This shift offsets the impact of Bitcoin halving and has led to more profitable and stable revenue streams.

Did you know? AI workloads and Bitcoin mining both demand massive energy. By planning for both, miners can lease excess capacity to AI firms, especially during crypto downturns, turning stranded power into a stable cash flow.

Case study: Core Scientific’s $3.5 billion lifeline

Core Scientific is a strong example of how shifting to AI can help a struggling Bitcoin mining company recover. After facing financial difficulties and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022 due to low Bitcoin prices and heavy debt, the company restructured and returned to the Nasdaq in early 2024. 

In June 2024, Core Scientific signed a 12-year, $3.5 billion contract with CoreWeave, an AI cloud computing company. The agreement allowed Core Scientific to use parts of its infrastructure to support CoreWeave’s high-performance computing needs, moving away from solely mining Bitcoin to also providing AI services.

Although the company’s revenue in the first quarter of 2025 fell to $79.5 million from…