Bitcoin miners are shifting to AI

Bitcoin miners are shifting to AI

McKenzie sigalos is at the consensus crypto conference in Austin Texas with more hi McKenzie hey now there’s of course been a surgeon demand for AI confute and infrastructure and a growing number of Bitcoin miners are retrofitting their massive facilities to help meet that need now publicly traded firms like core scientific Hut 8 fit digital And Hive have all launched AI operations they’re looking to beef up their revenue streams after the having back in April cut rewards paid out to bitcoin miners by 50% now core which emerged from bankruptcy in January tells CNBC that it’s been diversifying Beyond Bitcoin for about 5 years now yeah the best way to think about Bitcoin mining facilities is that we are essentially powered shells to the data center industry and so the retrofit back to HPC is actually much easier than one would think and so there are components that we have to purchase to retrofit for HBC but are it’s things that we can easily acquire pivoting from Bitcoin mining to AI isn’t as simple as repurposing existing infrastructure it means swapping out as6 so the processor purpose built for crypto Mining and replacing them with gpus digital asset fund manager coin shares said in a report that even though AI operations demand up to 20 times the capital expenditure compared to Bitcoin mining they’re currently more Capital efficient and profitable companies like Hive and Hut 8 are seeing a positive impact on their revenue structures currently bit digital derives 27% of its revenue from AI Hut 8 at 6% And Hive at 4% guys there’s certainly been a lot of talk about the the the power demand that that number one AI does uh but number two that that Bitcoin mining uh brings are the two uh sort of compounding that problem uh in other words when they get together Ai and Bitcoin you have kind of a multiplier effect on the on the power grid demand and the and the problems it could cause yeah it’s a great question and energy demand is still something that these miners are perfecting I will say a lot of them are looking at using clean energy simply because it’s the cheapest in many markets an industry report estimates that the Bitcoin network is actually 55% powered by sustainable electricity miners also say another benefit of their business is that they can power demand they can power down if demand is high the core CEO says that they’re actually already working with the grid to figure out how certain AI applications can periodically be shut off to cut energy use meanwhile new data out today and to your point Tyler finds that data centers could use up to 9% of the US’s Power by 2030 that’s more than double what it is today so tapping into nuclear energy is seen by many as the answer to meeting that demand Bitcoin miner ter wolf runs on nuclear and they’re another big mining name jumping into powering machine learning all right Mackenzie thanks very much McKenzie sigalos in Austin for us today

CNBC’s Mackenzie Sigalos joins ‘Power Lunch’ to discuss bitcoin miners getting into AI.